Composition-based software development, for example, starting from reusable Web services, APIs or UI widgets, is by now state of the art and common practice in modern software engineering. Only hardly is it possible to imagine today the development of a new app without some piece of business logic, data or visualization widget sourced from third parties and seamlessly integrated into the app. Much has been achieved over the last years in terms of standardization, tool support and simplification, in order to facilitate these kinds of development scenarios. Yet, composition is still mostly a prerogative of skilled programmers, and people without the necessary software engineering background are not able to leverage on Web services or APIs on their own. In fact, their prerogative is the Surface Web with it’s applications and interactive UIs. The goal of this talk is to hypothesize a composition paradigm that instead leverages on the UIs of applications, not their APIs, and that makes composition-based development accessible to an ever wider range of “developers,” without giving up too much of expressive power.

Florian Daniel is a tenure track assistant professor at the Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria (DEIB) of the Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy. He has worked as research fellow in University of Trento, Italy, as visiting research fellow in UNSW, Sydney, Australia and HP Labs, Palo Alto, California, and as visiting professor in PUCRS, Porto Alegre, Brazil. Florian holds a Ph.D. in Information Technology (2007) and a M.Sc. in Computer Engineering (2003). He is co-author of the books Mashups: Concepts, Models and Architectures (Springer, 2014) and Engineering Web Applications (Springer, 2009) as well as of more than a hundred scientific publications in international journals, conferences and workshops. He served as program chair of BPM 2013, ICWE 2013 and MobiWIS 2013, and co-organized the international workshops Rapid Mashup Challenge, ComposableWeb, BEWEB and AEWSE. He has been actively participating in various roles in several EU FP6/FP7 research projects and a number of industry-funded research projects in Europe, the United States and China.