Extending user-interface toolkits with hypermedia functionality

This paper describes a technique for extending user interface toolkits with hypermedia functionality. The technique employs a separation-of-concerns approach which is incremental, reusable, and maintainable. The essence of the approach is to integrate a user interface toolkit with an open hypermedia system. The integration occurs through a set of integrated widgets and a hypermedia infrastructure. The infrastructure acts as a gateway between the toolkit and the open hypermedia system. The integrated widgets use the infrastructure to augment their behavior with hypermedia services. Applications constructed with the resulting toolkit contain hypermedia enabled widgets, automatically providing consistent cross application hypermedia services with little effort required by the application developer. The benefits of generalizing the technique to other services, such as groupware, are also discussed