[A] paper, from University of Trento and Huawei Technologies, focuses on a model for distributed user interfaces, bringing together people, web services and UIs in a single tool, rather than developing process models and UIs independently. They consider UI components (effectively a widget) as objects representing process state; changes in the UI will cause underlying process services to be invoked, and changes in the underlying process/data will change the UI representation.
The goal is to bring together the needs of UI synchronization and service orchestration into a single language, even though UIs are event-based and services are invoked as part of control flows, and the don’t typically speak the same language. To do this, they extended BPEL to create BPEL4UI, which is the standard business process execution language with UI-specific modeling constructs. This manifests as a three new basic object types: pages, actors and UI components. They extended a BPEL Eclipse plug-in to included these new object types, allowing the UI to modeled as part of the BPEL process model, and added hooks so that the BPEL engine calls a UI engine server rather than the UI directly...
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