The Virtual Splitter: Refactoring Web Applications for the Multiscreen Environment
This addresses the problem of adapting web applications for multiscreen use, which is incremental as it builds on existing transformation approaches but automates and generalizes the process.
The paper tackles the challenge of automatically transforming single-screen web applications for multiscreen environments by proposing a refactoring system that analyzes and splits applications, delivering two instrumented applications ready for distribution across devices, validated on examples like a YouTube page and a Mozilla video application.
Creating web applications for the multiscreen environment is still a challenge. One approach is to transform existing single-screen applications but this has not been done yet automatically or generically. This paper proposes a refactor-ing system. It consists of a generic and extensible mapping phase that automatically analyzes the application content based on a semantic or a visual criterion determined by the author or the user, and prepares it for the splitting process. The system then splits the application and as a result delivers two instrumented applications ready for distribution across devices. During runtime, the system uses a mirroring phase to maintain the functionality of the distributed application and to support a dynamic splitting process. Developed as a Chrome extension, our approach is validated on several web applications, including a YouTube page and a video application from Mozilla.