Meta-model to Support End-User Development of Web Based Business Information Systems

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 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.

Web applications are not protected by today's network level firewalls, because they allow access to TCP port 80 without restrictions. However, many successful attacks today are not on the network level, but on application level. For protecting against application level attacks, a firewall must understand the application protocols, that are used on its open ports. This happens in application level firewalls and for Web application in Web application firewalls. The underlying concepts of Web application firewalls differ much from the concepts of traditional network level firewalls. This book explains the underlying concepts of Web application firewalls. Afterwards, they are applied to a collection of security requirements, that application developers should respect today for developing a secure Web application. A Web application firewall is capable of automatically implementing many of these requirements. As a result, Web application developers can ignore these requirements, because the Web applications firewall already ensures their implementation and therefore the security of the Web application. This book is intended for anyone, who is interested in securing his Web application.

Due to problems in correctly understanding user requirements the Information System (IS) development community have recognised the need to involve end-users in the development and maintenance of web applications. End-users perceive web applications through user interfaces (UIs) and commonly use sketches of UIs to express their requirements. Thus, it would be desirable to provide an end-user development methodology centred on UI modelling techniques. In this paper a visual modelling approach is presented to empower end-users in developing data intensive web applications starting from user interface descriptions. The modelling language follows a holistic approach by representing both static and behavioural information of a web application in one visual model. The visual model allows the specification of the look-and-feel of the application through mock-ups, and the user interactions through links, annotations, and widget references. End-users are guided during the modelling process by providing a summary view to manage the design of complex applications and a data model view to improve the quality of the generated applications.

Web applications are evolving towards strong content-centred information systems accessible through the web. The development processes and implementation of these applications are unlike the development and implementation of traditional information systems. In this paper, we propose a Web Engineering Method (WEM): a method for developing Content Management System (CMS)-based web applications. Critical to a successful development of CMS-based web applications is adaptation to the dynamic business. We first define CMS-based web applications and identify their specific characteristics. Combining these characteristics with situational factors in projects, we show that by taking parts of proven methods, such as UML-based Web Engineering (UWE) and the Unified Process (UP), a unique method can be assembled for situational development of CMS-based web applications. We successfully validated the method at GX, a web-technology company specialised in developing and implementing CMS-based web applications.

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.

In recent months the priority area of modern medicine has become on-line informatization and computerization. The most promising development has been the use of information and computer support in an integrated diagnostic system for patients with cleft lip and palate. In our research we aim to developed an autonomous web application that allows practitioners to determine the tactics of multidisciplinary diagnosis and treatment based on data integrated into a specific web application in order to increase the efficiency of the treatment of children with cleft lip and palate of different age groups. Based on more than 45 years of clinical and scientific experience in diagnosis and treatment of patients with cleft lip and palate we developed a web application “ADI” (Application of Digital Imaging). The developed web application “ADI” is a system for processing, accumulating and analyzing information on the rehabilitation of patients with cleft lip and palate by type of pathology and age, allowing doctors to obtain structured information about the stages of the necessary methods of interdisciplinary cleft lip and palate diagnosis and treatment. One of the main advantages of “ADI” web application is the ability to quickly exchange information between specialists in various fields of knowledge. Such complex information is the basis for combining scientific ideas, analysis and exchange of experience of various specialists, thereby making it possible to create a unified system of interdisciplinary rehabilitation of children with congenital pathology of the maxillofacial region #COMESYSO1120.

The business value of Information Systems (IS) is one of the most prominent topics in IS research and the collective effort of scholars interested in this topic has offered a thorough understanding of the organisational effects of IS investments. However, the organisation-level view obscures how IS business value emerges from individual-level IS use. This analytical blind spot reduces the plurality of IS business values that users realise through IS use to organisation-level outcomes. We fill this blind spot by theorising about how IS business value is realised through individual-level IS use. Building on the findings of a case study, we theorise the relationships between users’ valueception of IS, their IS use and the realisation of IS business value through this use. Our theorising advances knowledge on IS business value realisation at the individual level and shows that individual-level IS use realises more than one IS business value. This insight into the plurality of IS business value opens the door for further value-reflexive investigations. Our theorising offers analytical vocabulary that future studies can utilise to examine and explain phenomena of value realisation through IS use.

Parametric Web application cost estimation is referred to the usage of mathematical model to derive the estimated effort and duration of Web application development. Typically, majority of Web application developers are applying expert judgment and estimation by analogy in Web application development. This paper is focusing on feasibility study of WEBMO (Web model), a parametric Web application cost estimation model, in Web application development within Klang Valley in Malaysia. WEBCOMO, a parametric Web application tool is developed based on WEBMOpsilas methodology to fulfill the objective of the study.

End-users who are nonprogrammers create web applications by using advanced web development tools. However, these tools are not supported by any methodological process which produces that web applications are of low quality. This paper presents an approach to bring web engineering principles to the end-user community. We complement the web engineering method OOWS with tools that allow end-users to develop web applications by: (1) describing web applications in terms of the end-users’ knowledge about the application domain, (2) automatically obtaining a web application prototype by means of the OOWS code generation strategy, and (3) personalizing the web application look and feel by simply selecting a design template. To achieve this, an ontology-based strategy is introduced to support end-users throughout the web application development. We also introduce a strategy that allows us to define domain-independent presentation templates.

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.

Organizational Information Systems (IS) collect, store, and manage personal and business information through web applications and services. Due to regulation laws and to protect the privacy of users, clients, and business partners, such information must be kept private. This paper proposes a privacy reference architecture that can serve as foundation for the analysis, design and development of web applications with privacy concerns. Using the proposed reference architecture, these applications can manage personal information in a more secure manner, protecting such information from different sources of privacy violation. Also, it can be used as a standardization model that facilitates system integration and communication. The architecture was evaluated regarding four key quality attributes: completeness, applicability, usability and feasibility. Results show that it brings values for the stakeholders and is an important tool in the analysis and implementation of applications with privacy protection.

The article discusses technologies for developing the web application designed to accompany the process of conducting an intellectual game in the format of an interactive quiz. An analysis of similar applications was carried out, which showed that none of them satisfies all the criteria essential in this situation. Requirements for the web application have been determined: the ability to create a library of quizzes, various types of questions, edit ready-made quizzes, participants enter answers through their devices online, award points for the correctness and speed of answers, display questions on the presenter's screen and on team devices, view intermediate and final results in the form of a list, returning participants to the game if necessary, saving the points received. The process of developing an optimized user interface using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, which allows users to interact with the web application, is described, the structure of the web application, the main forms of the administrator and game participants are presented. The server side of the application was developed using Node.JS technologies, including the Socket.io library, and the MongoDB database, the resulting collection of non-relational database is shown. To implement the functionality of the application pages, JavaScript was used; examples of codes are presented that implement the mechanism for connecting the presenter to the game, retrieving information from the database, recording the team's response, and awarding points for the correctness and speed of the response. The web application allows you to reduce the time spent by event organizers and participants and makes it possible to improve the organization of work in general. The presented web application for accompanying intellectual games was successfully approbated during events at the Nizhny Tagil State Social-Pedagogical Institute (branch) of the Russian State Vocational Pedagogical University. The materials of the article can serve as practical recommendations for the development of such web applications to accompany intellectual games held in the format of interactive quizzes.

The purpose of the article is to research, analyze and consider the general problems that TypeScript technology for strict typing solves when developing web applications. The research methodology consists of semantic analysis methods of the basic concepts of a given subject area (development of web applications using JavaScript and TypeScript). The article discusses the analysis results of the TypeScript technology’s use in comparison with JavaScript. The novelty of the research is the analysis of modern TypeScript technology and its solution to the problems of strict typing in the development of web applications. The conclusion of the research of the TypeScript technology carried out in the article is to determine its essence, the purpose of creation, advantages and disadvantages, and determine the situations of the appropriateness of its use.

There have been a considerable amount of interests in providing the state-of-theart product design and manufacture techniques and methods accessible on the Internet from web browsers. This chapter concerns with the process of building web applications for product design and manufacture. The focus is on how such systems are being developed and implemented. However, there have been considerable difficulties in the design, development, and implementation of web applications in product design and manufacture. The complexity can be understood in several ways. For example, there is no rigorous and systematic approach to the development of web applications at present. Current web application development and management practices are mostly ad hoc, heavily dependent on the knowledge and experience of individual developers.