The websa approach: Applying model driven engineering to web applications

The Web engineering research community has proposed several Web design methods that have proven successful in the specification of the functional aspects (such as domain, navigation and presentation) posed by Web applications. However, the architectural aspects are often ignored in the design and the Web application is not specified enough. This development process produces a gap between the Web design models and the final implementation. To overcome this limitation, we extend the different Web methodologies with a generic approach called WebSA. WebSA is based on the Model Driven Engineering (MDE) paradigm that promotes models as the primary artifacts needed to carry out a software project from beginning to end. To do this, WebSA proposes a Model Driven Development made up of a set of UML architectural models and QVT model transformations as a mechanism for (1) integrating the functional aspects of the current Web methodologies with the architectural models as well as for (2) defining a set of transformations from the architectural models to platform-specific models such as J2EE, .NET, etc. To illustrate our approach, in this paper we combine WebSA with the OO-H method, to tackle the design of a running example such as the Travel Agency system.