Facing the Technological Challenges of Web 2.0: A RIA Model-Driven Engineering Approach

One of the main reasons for the success of Web 2.0 is the improvement in user experience. This improvement is a consequence of the evolution from HTML User Interfaces (UI) to more usable and richer UI. The most popular Web 2.0 applications have selected the Rich Internet Application (RIA) paradigm to achieve this goal. However, the current Web Engineering methods do not provide the expressivity required to produce RIA interfaces. This work presents a RIA Metamodel to deal with the new technological challenges that have arisen with Web 2.0 development. This metamodel supports two main perspectives: 1) the definition of the UI as a combination of widgets from a selected RIA technology; and 2) the specification of the UI interaction as a consequence of the events produced by the user. In order to illustrate how this RIA Metamodel can be used in a Model-driven Engineering (MDE) method, this work also presents the integration of the RIA Metamodel with the OOWS method.