Development of CMS-based Web-Applications Using a Model-Driven Approach

The emerging Model-Driven Engineering paradigm advocates the use of models as first-class citizens in the software development process, while artifacts such as documentation and source-code can be quickly produced from those models by using automated transformations. One of the many types of deployment platforms that can potentially benefit from such model-driven approaches are Content Management Systems, as these approaches can significantly accelerate the development of new web-applications and features, as well as simplify their maintenance. This work proposes the creation of a model-driven approach for the development of web-applications based on Content Management Systems. This approach is based on the creation of two modeling languages (which are situated at different levels of abstraction, and are used to both quickly model a web-application and provide a common ground for the creation of additional languages), and a mechanism for the processing of models specified using those languages. The current results of this work so far are the development of a Content Management System that effectively supports web-applications of medium complexity, and the creation of a reference case study that will be used to validate this work.