Retargeting Web pages to other computing platforms with VAQUITA

Bouillon, Laurent [UCL] Vanderdonckt, Jean [UCL]

Mobile platforms are becoming an increasingly important alternative for accessing Web pages. Many Web pages are not suited to these platforms and need to be adapted, or rewritten from scratch. Adaptation can be carried out in two ways: either by dynamic conversion or static reengineering. VAQUITA belongs to the second category by applying a model-based approach to reverse engineer Web pages at a certain level of abstraction to transfer them to other computing platforms afterwards. Instead of reverse engineering a presentation model and translating it into another model specified for a particular platform, this paper proposes reverse engineering tailored for any target platform, even one not yet defined. The essence of this reverse engineering approach involves composing several functions of abstraction, reflection, translation, and reification into two steps: retargeting and regenerating a Web page to another platform.