Model Driven Software Engineering for Web Applications

Model driven software engineering (MDSE) is becoming a widely
accepted approach for developing complex applications and it is on
its way to be one of the most promising paradigms in software
engineering. MDSE advocates the use of models as the key artifacts
in all phases of the development process, from analysis to design,
implementation and testing. The most promising approach to model
driven engineering is the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) defined
by the Object Management Group (OMG). Applications are modeled at a
platform independent level and are transformed to (possibly
several) platform specific implementations. Model driven Web
engineering (MDWE) is the application of model driven engineering
to the domain of Web application development where it might be
particularly helpful because of the continuous evolution of Web
technologies and platforms. However, most current approaches for
MDWE provide only a partial application of the MDA pattern.
Further, metamodels and transformations are not always made
explicit and metamodels are often too general or do not contain
sufficient information for the automatic code generation. Thus, the
main goal of this work is the complete application of the MDA
pattern to the Web application domain from analysis to the
generated implementation, with transformations playing an important
role at every stage of the development process. Explicit metamodels
are defined for the platform independent analysis and design and
for the platform specific implementation of dynamic Web
applications. Explicit transformations allow the automatic
generation of executable code for a broad range of technologies.
For pursuing this goal, the following approach was chosen. A
metamodel is defined for the platform independent analysis and for
the design of the content, navigation, process and presentation
concerns of Web applications as a conservative extension of the UML
(Unified Modeling Language) metamodel, together with a
cor-responding UML profile as notation. OCL constraints ensure the
well-formedness of models and are checked by transformations.
Transformations implement the systematic evolution of analysis and
design models. A generic platform for Web applications built on an
open-source Web platform and a generic runtime environment is
proposed that represents a family of platforms supporting the
combination of a broad range of technologies. The transformation to
the platform specific models for this generic platform is
decomposed along the concerns of Web applications to cope in a
fine-grained way with technology changes. For each of the concerns
a metamodel for the corresponding technology is defined together
with the corresponding transformations from the platform
independent design models. The resulting models are serialized to
code by means of serialization transformations.