INTENTION OF THE PROTOTYPE       

 

 

This proposal consists in the creation a web application that contemplates the following essential functionalities.

 

1. - To show the content of news and events generated by the group of people, who administer the web.

 

2. - To have a download area, where it is possible to be acceded of a simple and friendly form by the visitors of the web.

 

 

3. - The administrators of the web will be able to upload files to the download area in an easy way. When somebody uploads a file to the web, he or she often has to write a brief description of the file that the user uploads. This problem can be solved using two different points of view:  first (the "on line" solution) uploading the file to the server thus adding a brief description in the application through a web page, but this system needs to be connected to it, in the moment that we must include the brief description of the file. Another option (the "off line" solution), can be create another file with the descriptions joined to the file to upload, so that when we were having a connection to Internet could upload it and later the application would be the ordered to obtain these description and to show it.

 

 

4.-To show the last news and events which comes from Internet at the moment, which are generated in their source, without anybody to publish and put them on line.

 

A very important problem, which a portal finds in Internet, is to show the information “on time”, because almost news are obsolete at the moment of publishing them; an example of this kind of news is in the digital newspapers where needs of somebody to be alert of the last published news to publish them in his portal, with the added problem, in some occasions, that part of its information can be lost or is misinterpret.

 

Another aspect of this problem is when a user is looking for information about a topic, always he is going to look in a specialized web before a portal. On the other hand if a user reads different newspapers he needs to open many windows of his browser, this is considerably too complicate, especially if the user is using a mobile device with a small screen.

 

Our proposal will be solve these problems, because the administrator would be able to get this important information, directly from the web and include it to the application data and the work of user only consists in select from where and which kind of news he wants to read in only one window.

 

 

5.-The application has to be functional for any device like mobile phones, pda’s or computers.

Now many web applications are designed only for one device; for example if somebody gets into a web page from a mobile phone, he will found an application designed only for mobiles phones, which is different from the others which are designed only for computers or pda’s, in this case this application will run with any device.

 

The following image shows the idea of the last point.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TECHNOLOGICAL DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT

 

 

In this project will be used specifications, like XHTML Basic, CSS mobile and SVG (Tiny and Basic), to show the contents in mobiles phones and pda’s, for the compatible web browsers with XHTML 1.1, will be used XHML and for the users of RSS readers will be used RSS (1.0 or well known RDF).

 

For the communication between the Service Requester and the Service Provider (see the next picture) will be used SOAP and RDF for the inverse operation.

Also, the language for obtaining the information from Internet by the Service Provider (the Database, FTP or RSS from other websites will be xml as the way for the communication like is showed in the following image:

 

 

 

FUNCTIONAL DESCRIPTION

 

With the new existing technologies (like the access to Internet from different kind of devices) and the new recommendations, now is possible to know which device is connected to our application and to show to him some or other contents depending on the needs of the user.

 

In the last image we can see the structure of the application of the idea, which can be explained from two points of view:

 

Server Application to the user:

 

The Service Provider will obtain the information from three sources:

 

            1.-From a MYSQL database server connected to the application using JDBC.

 

2.-A FTP Server from which available files will be obtained by the visitors of the web.

 The information about the files (like the description with images, the author and other file    information) will be obtained from a xml file (written in a special xml that I call FTP2XML) created by the user that uploads the file to the server or (if the user do not want to create this file) the application will create an standard xml code for the file.

 

3.-In case of obtain the news or other contents from another websites like digital newspapers, will be used RSS (1.0 or the other similar specifications according the original website).

 

 

Later the Service Provider will transform the information from these sources (in different languages) to an   unique xml language, that will transmitted to the Service Requester using the RDF specification, which before, the Service Requester has requested using the SOAP protocol. This transformation will be realized depending of the source, if the source is the MYSQL database server, the information will be transformed directly into RDF, if the data comes from internet (for example in RSS 2.0) it will be transformed into RDF using XSLT and finally if the source is the FTP server we can have two situations:

 

            One if the user that uploads the file has uploaded other file with the description of this file (written as the DTD of FTP2XML indications). In this case this description file will be transformed to RDF using XSLT.

 

            And the other case is, if this description file does not exist, the application will generate this code for a standard file and then will follows the way previously explained.

 

This image represents this organization:

 

This obtained information written in RDF will be send to the Service Requester which will transform (using XSLT) the RDF information to a compatible language, which the user’s browser can understand like XHTLM 1.1 or XHTML basic form mobile devices, for example.

 

 

User to the server

 

From this point of view,  the Service Requester (through a servlet programmed in java), in case of not having the information that the user is asking for, will make a request to the Service Provider, using SOAP, from which would obtain it from the FTP-Server, Database or from any external website, as shows the following image:

 

 

Finally, it is necessary to emphasize that the complexity of this design is, because it searches that if we have to make any change in the presentation of the application (for example) we must not make changes in the internal code of the application, only we have to change a CSS file or a XSLT file that controls the presentation of the application.

 

 

Document written by Antonio Quintáns Ocaña