Model-Driven Development of Dynamic Web Applications

The World-Wide Web is increasingly used as a means for accessing on-line applications, although the Web was initially created to access documents. In contrast to data-intensive Web sites, dynamic Web applications are Web-based business applications that execute business logic for changing the business state captured by the system. Due to the central roles of business logic, it is important for the dynamic Web applications to be modeled focusing not only on the client-side presentation, but also on the server-side processing such as the execution of business logic and page-flow control. This paper proposes a Web Application Descriptor (WAD) for modeling dynamic Web applications, and presents a prototype of the Web Application Development Support Tooling (WAST), which is an environment for developing Web applications based on the WAD model. WAD specifies the navigational structure of Web applications, and prescribes the behavior of Web applications in terms of logical pages and actions used for directing the page flow. WAD allows modeling such page navigation flow at a description level independent of both the content view and the runtime application framework, so that it can be exploited for the conceptual design and execution of dynamic Web applications. Rendered by www.RenderX.com Model-Driven Development of Dynamic Web Applications Table of