Towards a data access framework for service-oriented rich clients

Along with the proliferation of Web-delivered services and the wide adoption of popular Web technologies, it has been an emerging development style that composes services into Rich Internet Applications in the client-side runtimes, i.e. web browser. These service-oriented rich clients (SoRC) have to access and process client-side data for rich user experiences. Though server-side data access has become simple and effective facilitated by frameworks, e.g. Hibernate, client-side data access is yet challenging due to the heterogeneity and non-determinism derived from the local storage solutions (such as Flash LSO, HTML 5, etc.) and web browsers. In this paper, we present a web browser-based data access framework for service-oriented rich clients. The main efforts of this paper include: 1) an adapter for shielding heterogeneous data sources and a set of unified APIs for hiding incompatible access APIs provided by different local storage solutions; 2) a performance analysis of heterogeneous local storage solutions and an algorithm for selecting the most suitable local storage for current RIAs and browser; 3) a series of experiment evaluations for the feasibility and effectiveness of the framework.