A Stateful Web Augmentation Toolkit

Abstract

This thesis introduces the Stateful Web Augmentation Toolkit (SWAT), a toolkit that gives users control over the presentation and functionality of web content. SWAT extends Chickenfoot, a Firefox browser scripting environment that offers a variety of automation and manipulation capabilities. SWAT allows programmers to identify data records in database-backed web sites. Records are nodes of data corresponding to rows in the database backend. Programmers can append additional functionality to those nodes, and the resulting code can be bundled up and installed by users without technical expertise. SWAT consists of three modules: a Site Profile module that identifies data records, a Tweak module that defines the look and behavior of an interactive widget, and a Storage module that persists the widget state across pages and browser sessions. Default implementations are provided for each module, and these implementations adhere to an API that encompasses all communication between modules. A programmer can extend or replace any module to improve a system built with SWAT. With SWAT, end users can customize sites far beyond where their content providers stopped, and can add functionality that logically connects different data sources, changes how and where data is stored, and redefines how they interact with the web.