A GENERIC APPROACH TO USER INTERFACE CODE CONVERSION Arjun Chiddarwar B.E., Department of Information Technology Sinhgad College of Engineering, University Of Pune, Pune-41 arjun.chiddarwar@gmail.com Kamini Kadhane B.E., Department of Information Technology Sinhgad College of Engineering, University Of Pune, Pune-41 kamini.kadhane@gmail.com Rishi Parmar B.E., Department of Information Technology Sinhgad College of Engineering, University Of Pune, Pune-41 rishi_parmar@ymail.com Sudhanshu Sane B.E., Department of Information Technology Sinhgad College of Engineering, University Of Pune, Pune-41 sudhanshu.sane@gmail.com Abstract—In a software development lifecycle, there are numerous steps involved in the web page design process, and the GUI has a certain importance in today’s applications. There are various web design technologies available for use, each with a different approach to designing web pages. HTML currently is the most widely used web design technology due to its simplicity, but it does not support logic scripting within the HTML code. We have implemented a code convertor using .NET platform and XML related technologies, which can be used to convert HTML page to any other web design technology such as ASP.NET, JSP, and PHP, as these target languages allow scripting within code. In this paper, we put forth a generic approach to accomplish this task. Keywords- ASP.NET; code converter; code generation;GUI; HTML; .NET framework; parser; XML; XSLT I. INTRODUCTION In this paper, we focus on the conversion of HTML to ASP.NET. The same approach can be used for conversion to other web technologies. Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) is the main markup language for primarily creating web pages that can be displayed using a web browser. The browser uses the tags to interpret the content of the page and accordingly displays them. HTML elements form the building blocks of all websites [1]. Active Server Pages (ASP) is a server-side scripting environment that can be used to create and run dynamic, interactive Web server applications. With ASP.NET, you can combine HTML pages and script commands to create interactive Web pages and powerful Web-based applications that are easy to develop and modify. Fundamentally an ASP.NET page is just the same as an HTML page. If a client requests an HTML page from the server, the server sends the page to the client's browser without any modifications. If a client requests an ASP.NET page, the server processes any executable code in the page, before the results are sent back to the client's browser. Thus HTML pages are static and server side code cannot be embedded in it, whereas ASP.NET can contain scripting making it dynamic [2][3]. In a software design cycle, GUI development team and developers work separately. The GUI is developed based on the requirement and wants of the client. After the client has approved of the GUI, the HTML prototype is given to the development team. The development team has to give functionality to the web page and make it dynamic. But this scripting cannot be embedded into HTML as mentioned earlier. Thus the developer has to recreate the GUI in ASP.NET technology where he can include scripting. This can result in undesirable changes to the UI. Client might be unsatisfied with the final design in such cases, even though the web page performs as per requirements. This is where our project comes into picture. In this paper, we present an approach for building a software tool, using .NET framework and XML related technologies, for complete conversion of HTML code into corresponding ASP.NET, JSP, PHP code, while retaining all elements and attributes of the GUI. Arjun Chiddarwar et al./ International Journal of Computer Science & Engineering Technology (IJCSET) ISSN : 2229-3345 Vol. 4 No. 03 Mar 2013 243