The Virtual Splitter: Refactoring Web Applications for the Multiscreen Environment

TL;DR

This paper introduces a system that automatically refactors single-screen web applications into multiscreen versions, enabling dynamic distribution and functionality preservation across devices, validated through real-world examples.

Contribution

It presents a generic, extensible refactoring system that automatically analyzes, splits, and maintains web applications for multiscreen environments, a novel approach in this domain.

Findings

Successfully applied to YouTube and Mozilla video applications

Automates analysis and splitting process

Maintains application functionality during runtime

Abstract

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.