Patent ID: 7131064

Claim:
A system for designing software applications, the system comprising: a client abstraction layer for use in design time in developing a web-based software application, the web-based software application comprising one or more HTML pages, the client abstraction layer being an abstraction of a user interface for a software application, the client abstraction layer comprising: a definition layer, the definition layer defining XML that is permitted to be used in the system; a plurality of XML templates, the XML templates providing XML page descriptions as an abstraction of HTML pages at design time, the XML page descriptions being used to define layout information; an integration logic XSLT layer, said integration logic XSLT layer abstracting said plurality of XML templates, and comprising client specific logic and middleware specific logic, wherein: the client specific logic abstracts a client on which the web-based application will be used from the XML and the client specific logic comprises a client-side framework, said client-side framework providing object-oriented features to a client-side scripting language; and the middleware specific logic abstracts middleware on which the web-based application will be used from the XML; and an XML parser, the XML parser publishing applications for use during run time.