Managing Runtime Adaptivity through Active Rules: the Bellerofonte Framework

Modern Web development is more and more moving towards the production of fullfledged, complex Web applications, possibly equipped with active and/or adaptive behaviors. On the one side, this evolution implies higher development costs and times; on the other side, such implications are contrasted by the dynamics of the modern Web, which demands for even faster application development and evolution cycles. In this paper we focus on the above problem, considering adaptive Web applications. We defined an Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rule-based approach aimed at facilitating the management and evolution of adaptive application features and we developed an engine, namely Bellerofonte, to process ECA rules. In our approach, we decouple the active logic (i.e. the adaptivity rules) from the execution of the actual application by means of a decoupled rule engine capturing events and autonomously enacting the adaptivity actions.