Using established Web Engineering knowledge in model-driven approaches

A lot of research is currently conducted in the field of Model-Driven Development (MDD), especially regarding its applications to specific domains. Another field that enjoys a great amount of popularity is the Web. As a result, one of the domains MDD is applied to quite frequently is that of Web Applications. However, Web Engineering differs significantly from general Software Engineering and a number of well-established non-MDD solutions already exist in that field. This leads to several interesting questions, which have been left unanswered so far. In this paper, we address this shortcoming by analyzing whether the problems encountered in the field of Web Engineering can really be solved with MDD approaches. We also answer the questions whether MDD will be able to solve these problems better and/or cheaper than traditional Web Engineering approaches and whether the current Web MDD propositions live up to this potential. While answering these questions, we will show that there exists a great synergy between the two groups and that the success of MDD in the Web domain will depend on exploiting the strengths of both. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.