Automated development of constraint-driven web applications

Nowadays, Web Applications (WAs) are complex software sys- tems, used by multiple users with different roles and often devel- oped to support and manage business processes. Due to the chang- ing nature of the supported processes, WAs need to be easily and quickly modified, to adapt and align them to the processes they support. In recent years, Model Driven Engineering (MDE) ap- proaches have been proposed and used to develop and evolveWAs. However, the definition of appropriate MDE approaches for the de- velopment of flexible process-centric WAs is still limited. In par- ticular, (flexible) workflow models have never been integrated with the models (e.g., presentation, information models) used in MDE approaches to develop this type of applications. In this paper, we present M3D (Model Driven Development with Declare), a tool for developingWAs that integrates three MDE metamodels used to represent the main components of aWA with the metamodel of De- clare, a declarative language to model business processes. The tool exploits and combines the declarative nature of Declare and the ad- vantages of MDE to get an efficient roundtrip engineering support to develop and evolve flexible process-centric WAs.

The Sixth International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2006) held in Palo Alto, California, at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, hosted the workshops MDWE, AEWSE and SMIWEP-MATeS. This volume of the ACM Digital Library contains a selection of papers presented at the three workshops which took place on July, 10th and July, 11th.ICWE 2006 and the associated workshops aim to promote research and scientific exchange related to Web Engineering and to bring together practitioners, scientists and researchers, as well as those interested in learning more about Web Engineering. The Web Engineering discipline comprises the development and use of models, methodologies, technologies, tools and techniques that are used to develop and maintain Web applications within economic constraints. In the era of Web-based information and services we are living in, the development of such Web systems is demanding our attention in order to provide sound and engineered solutions to specific problems in the Web Engineering field. The articles presented at the ICWE 2006 workshops have proposed novel results in this area focusing each on a specific domain:The Second International Workshop on Model-Driven Web Engineering (MDWE'06) focused on model-based and model-driven development of Web applications. The main goal of this workshop series is to promote the use of models and model transformations as well as the definition of domain specific modeling languages (DSML) and construction of CASE tools supporting model-driven processes. Strengths and weaknesses of model-driven approaches in the Web domain were lively discussed during the workshop.The First International Workshop on Adaptation and Evolution in Web Systems Engineering (AEWSE'06) aimed at bringing together researchers and practitioners with different research interests, belonging to communities like Web Engineering, Adaptive Hypermedia, User Modeling, Active Databases, Semantic Web, Ontology Evolution, Database Evolution, Temporal Data, Software Engineering and Mobile Computing. The goal of the workshop was to address adaptation and evolution of Web applications both during design, implementation and deployment.The Joint Workshop on Web Services Modeling and Implementation using Sound Web Engineering Practices and Methods, Architectures & Technologies for e-Service Engineering (SMIWEP-MATeS'06) covered current state-of-the-art and best practices in e-Service engineering, focusing on aspects such as development of semantic Web applications, integration of technologies, requirements engineering, patterns and reference architectures, design methodologies and processes and quality models.

Model Driven Engineering (MDE) is increasingly gaining acceptance in the development of Web Applications as a mean to leverage abstraction and render business logic resilient to technological changes. This paper describes the beContent project with its modeling languages and tools, which aims at the automated generation of rich Web applications.

Model-driven engineering has become the emerging standard for software development focusing on the use of models as first-class citizens. One possible field of application of such model-driven approaches can be the open source Content Management Systems (CMS) domain. Typically, CMS are built using the source-code-oriented software development process raising issues related to usability, performance and other qualities of service in an application’s lifecycle. To overcome these issues, the use of model-driven approaches in the development of CMS-based web applications (WAs) can be particular beneficial.To this end, we propose a model-driven reverse engineering approach for automatic mining of the conceptual model of existing WAs developed using the widely used CMS Joomla! by applying data mining techniques. This methodology can be used to form the cornerstone of an evaluation framework for Joomla!-based WAs either in the design or maintenance process.

The integration of domain-specific concepts in a model-driven engineering (MDE) approach raises a number of interesting research questions. There are two possibilities to represent these concepts. The first one focuses on models that contain domain-specific concepts only, i.e. domain-specific modelling languages (DSML). The second one advocates the integration of domain-specific concepts in general-purpose models, using what we will refer to in this paper as domain-specific modelling annotation languages (DSMAL). In this position paper, we argue that each approach is particularly suited for specific activities and specific actors, and show how they can be developed and used together. We also highlight the challenges created by the use of two representations, such as the evaluation of models OCL constraints and the synchronisation between the two representations. As an illustration, we present rbacUML, our approach for integrating role-based access control (RBAC) concepts into an MDE approach.

Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing is an integral part of the development of power system automation solutions. HIL test beds facilitate system-level testing and validation of controllers against their specifications. The information required for HIL test bed configurations is typically scattered across different tools used in the development of power system automation solutions. These tools often have different formats and naming schemes. This implies that a significant effort is required for consolidating data from the tools and for creating valid test configurations from the consolidated data. This paper presents a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approach for creating HIL test configurations in a tool-, platform-, and protocol-agnostic manner. It shows how the MDE approach can be applied in practice to derive test configurations based on the information originating from different tools in a semi-automated fashion.

In the development and design of Web application, the choice of framework development is very important. A good framework development can speed up the development of Web application, reduce development costs and the workload of developers. Meanwhile, Web application has good expansibility and portability. The framework based on SpringMVC + Spring + Mybatis (SSM) has good performance and rapid development efficiency, gradually becoming a mainstream development framework of Web application.

The specific requirements of developing Internet of Things (IoT) software for public transportation systems should be considered in addition to the problems always observed in IoT system development. After defining the problems encountered in the development of IoT-based public transport systems, the current model-driven engineering (MDE) approaches for IoT development are examined and their applicability for public transport systems is questioned in this paper. Several points of view are given about what new MDE approaches specific to this field should include in order to eliminate the identified deficiencies. Moreover, it is indicated that new MDE approaches should be designed including round-trip engineering to provide high mobility, use of special standards, in-vehicle communication networks and support for different system-on-chips in these public transportation systems.

During the last decade, Model Driven Engineering (MDE) has been proposed for supporting the development, maintenance and evolution of software systems. Model Driven Architecture (MDA), Software Factories and Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) are among the most representatives MDE approaches. Nowadays, it is well recognized that model transformation is at the heart of MDE approaches and, consequently represents one of the most important operations in MDE. However, despite the multitude of model transformation language proposals emerging from academic world and industry, these transformations are often manually specified; which is a tedious and error-prone task, and therefore an expensive process. Matching operation between metamodels is the keystone toward a (semi-)automatic transformation process. In this paper, the authors review metamodel matching techniques of the literature and then analyze their pros and cons in order to show how they can be useful for a semi-automatic transformation process. The result is a comparison of metamodel matching techniques, highlighting their similarities and differences in terms of information used for matching, demonstrating significant similarities between these techniques. Next, the authors compare four well-known metamodel matching techniques namely Similarity flooding, SAMT4MDE+ (extended Semi-Automatic Matching Tool for Model Driven Engineering), ModelCVS and AML (AtlanMod Matching Language) on ten couples of metamodels. For this comparison, the authors define a set of six criteria inspired from the database schema matching. One among these criteria is relevant to the quality of matching and for which we define a quality measure metrics. Furthermore, the authors develop a plug-in under Eclipse to support our comparison using ten couples of metamodels.

Defining low power design intent for a system-on-chip (SoC) consists in specifying its power management architecture and strategy according to specific low power techniques such as power gating and multi-voltage scaling requirements. Choosing the most-energy efficient power intent for a final system contributes widely to reduce its overall power consumption. At Transaction-Level, a rapid exploration of different power intent alternatives can be made. In this paper, we present a Model Driven Engineering (MDE) approach to automate low power design intent specifications and accelerate Low Power Design Intent Space Exploration (LPDISE) using a Transaction-Level power-aware design methodology. This MDE approach mainly relies on a high level abstraction of the Unified Power Format (UPF) standard concepts that fit a TLM approach use. Then, the MDE approach is applied to automatically generate a UPF code defining the most energy-efficient power intent and being a reference file for Register Transfer Level (RTL) design team. This task focuses on a smart deduction of adequate UPF commands from the high level abstraction semantics. The effectiveness of the proposed MDE approach is illustrated by an example.

Web application development from simple web pages to complex interactive platforms (including social networks, e-commerce systems, corporate portals) requires new approaches, tools and technologies. JavaScript libraries and frameworks play a special role in developing web applications, simplifying the creation of effective, scalable, and convenient interfaces. The purpose of the article is to research the problems and prospects of using React in combination with Redux when creating web applications with a complex structure, to assess the advantages of their joint use in comparison with similar tools and to develop the web application “FarmerProducts”. The research methodology consists of the main methodological approaches and technological tools for developing web applications. Such methods, in particular, are: system and comparative analysis – to identify the features of creating web applications; method of expert assessments, which involves the study of literary sources and information resources, conducting interviews and surveys of experts, as well as the processes of developing and testing scalable and high-performance web applications based on the use of React and Redux. The scientific novelty of the research is the analysis of modern tools (React, Angular, Vue. js) for developing web applications, identifying problems and prospects for their use, creating an author’s web application (using React and Redux), which includes an intuitive interface, a flexible database, simplifying the process of working with the application by using a stack of modern technologies. Conclusions. The paper analyses the problems and prospects of using modern web application development tools; focuses on React, which is suitable for different projects; conducts a comparative analysis of React with Angular, Vue. js and Svelte, identifies their main characteristics, advantages, disadvantages; demonstrates the dependence of the choice of tools on the project context (React in combination with Redux can provide an optimal balance between performance, flexibility and scalability); describes the author’s web application – the FarmerProducts online store; identifies further ways to improve this web application.

End-user development is proposed as a solution to the issues business organisations face when developing web applications to support their business processes. We are proposing a meta-model based development approach to support End-User Development. End-users can actively participate in web application development using tools to populate and instantiate the meta-model. The meta-model has three abstraction levels: Shell, Application and Function. At Shell Level, we model aspects common to all business web applications such as navigation and access control. At Application Level, we model aspects common to specific web applications such as workflows. At Function Level, we model requirements specific to the identified use cases. In this paper we discuss how we have solved the issues in application development for business end-users such as need for central repository of data, common log in, optimizing user model, application portability and balance between “Do it Yourself” (DIY) and professional developers in hierarchical meta-model approach. These solutions are being incorporated into Component based EApplication Development and Deployment Shell (CBEADS) version 4, supporting meta-model implementation. We believe that these solutions will help end-users to efficiently and effectively develop web applications using meta-model based development approach.

In the last years one of the main concerns of the software industry has been to reengineer their legacy Web Applications (WAs) to take advantage of the benefits introduced by Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). In this context, Model Driven (MD) Web Engineering approaches have been extended with new modeling primitives to obtain the benefits provided by RIA features. However, during the last decade, widespread language-specific Web frameworks have supported actual Web system development. In this paper we present a MD reverse engineering process to obtain a conceptual representation of the navigational concern of a legacy Web application (LWA), as an initial step within a LWA-to-RIA modernization process. WebML is selected as the target MD Web Engineering approach.

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is changing the way we build, operate, and maintain our software-intensive systems. Several projects using MDE practices are reporting significant improvements in quality and performance but, to be able to handle these projects, software engineers need a set of technical and interpersonal skills that are currently not widely available. The MDE postgraduate diploma intends to fill this gap by offering a full-time one year formation onMDE. The course syllabus is designed to teach students how to work at a higher abstraction level by the rigorous use of (software) models as the main artifacts in all software engineering activities. Contents include the conceptual framework of MDE plus all techniques and tools (e.g. for defining modeling languages, models, and model transformations) required to successfully complete software engineering projects following a MDE approach. The organizational impact (and challenges) of adopting MDE are exemplified using real industrial experiences. This article describes the MDE Diploma and the lessons that we learned after completing its first edition.

Web application frameworks are a proven means to accelerate the development of interactive web applications. However, implementing collaborative real-time applications like Google Docs requires specific concurrency control services (i.e. document synchronization and conflict resolution) that are not included in prevalent general-purpose frameworks like jQuery or Knockout. Hence, developers have to get familiar with specific collaboration frameworks (e.g. ShareJS) which substantially increases the development effort. To ease the development of collaborative web applications, we propose a set of source code annotations representing a lightweight mechanism to introduce concurrency control services into mature web frameworks. Those annotations are interpreted at runtime by a dedicated collaboration engine to sync documents and resolve conflicts. We enhanced the general-purpose framework Knockout with a collaboration engine and conducted a developer study comparing our approach to a traditional concurrency control library. The evaluation results show that the effort to incorporate collaboration capabilities into a web application can be reduced by up to 40 percent using the annotation-based solution.