Model-Driven Web Development for Multiple Platforms

Model-driven development of web applications relies on the definition of the mappings that transform high-level models to models of specific web platforms. Thus, the transformations are often platform-specific and may not be used for more than one platform. The current web, however, is a heterogeneous network of different technologies and it often happens that one specific application needs to run on several platforms. Also, many patterns of web applications could be re-used in several projects that are performed using different technological configurations. In this paper, we describe our approach for targeting multiple platforms by defining an intermediate abstract web platform. This is a technology-independent model that carries common properties of web applications. Thus, transformations will become two-step transformations; the first step targets the abstract web platform and hence, is re-usable. The second step maps the abstract web model to specific web platforms; this is shorter than conventional platform-specific transformations.