Optimizing Navigational Behavior and Social Media Interaction in Asynchronous Web Development
Mentor 1
Tian Zhao
Location
Union Wisconsin Room
Start Date
28-4-2017 1:30 PM
End Date
28-4-2017 4:00 PM
Description
Modern web development has a strong emphasis on asynchronous content generation, intuitive navigation, and social media connections. However, the implementation strategies for dynamic content generation has a negative impact on the ability to innately implement intuitive navigation and social media connections. Navigation related issues, such as page caching, bookmarking, and navigation history, were traditionally handled by browsers. However, in asynchronous web development, these fundamental concepts must be explicitly handled by the web developer due to the inherent nature of asynchronous content generation being executed in an environment devoid of natural state changes. Moreover, social media interaction with web content, typically presented as a snapshot of a web page, can no longer be relied upon to function properly in an asynchronous setting. These snapshots are constructed using a "scraping" algorithm on the URL of a web page. This presents issues in asynchronous web development owing to the fact that every page of generated content may have both the same URL and the same data being scraped. It is thus the developers' responsibility to explicitly spoof a URL that can be interacted with, as well as serve the desired data when that URL is scraped. This project builds a framework -- NavArrows, on top of a flexible JavaScript library for asynchronous programming, to give web developers a unified toolbox to pursue asynchronous content generation while maintaining the integrity of intuitive navigation and social media connections. Using NavArrows, a developer can configure desired behavior on navigation and social media scraping, then let the framework handle navigation through history states, dynamic URL spoofing, page caching, and social media scraping requests.
Optimizing Navigational Behavior and Social Media Interaction in Asynchronous Web Development
Union Wisconsin Room
Modern web development has a strong emphasis on asynchronous content generation, intuitive navigation, and social media connections. However, the implementation strategies for dynamic content generation has a negative impact on the ability to innately implement intuitive navigation and social media connections. Navigation related issues, such as page caching, bookmarking, and navigation history, were traditionally handled by browsers. However, in asynchronous web development, these fundamental concepts must be explicitly handled by the web developer due to the inherent nature of asynchronous content generation being executed in an environment devoid of natural state changes. Moreover, social media interaction with web content, typically presented as a snapshot of a web page, can no longer be relied upon to function properly in an asynchronous setting. These snapshots are constructed using a "scraping" algorithm on the URL of a web page. This presents issues in asynchronous web development owing to the fact that every page of generated content may have both the same URL and the same data being scraped. It is thus the developers' responsibility to explicitly spoof a URL that can be interacted with, as well as serve the desired data when that URL is scraped. This project builds a framework -- NavArrows, on top of a flexible JavaScript library for asynchronous programming, to give web developers a unified toolbox to pursue asynchronous content generation while maintaining the integrity of intuitive navigation and social media connections. Using NavArrows, a developer can configure desired behavior on navigation and social media scraping, then let the framework handle navigation through history states, dynamic URL spoofing, page caching, and social media scraping requests.
