AbstractsEngineering

A Two-Way Metamodeling Approach in Web Engineering

by Xhevi Qafmolla




Institution: Czech University of Technology
Department:
Year: 2015
Record ID: 1097151
Full text PDF: http://hdl.handle.net/10467/61364


Abstract

This dissertation thesis introduces a new model-driven approach in Web engineering that aims to decrease the communication gap between stakeholders during the early phases of the project and reduce the development e ort required for the production of the nal Web application. The approach has been applied in the domain of content-based Web applications and is supported by related methodology and proof-of-concept tools. While several model-driven approaches specialized in the discipline of Web engineering have been developed in the last decade, the majority of them is outdated, or is applied under speci c conditions in practice, usually involving a high cost of adoption. The main reason is that most of these approaches apply the modeling part in a top-down mode, i.e. they focus on a high-level conceptual model of the Web application upon which later are applied transformation techniques to generate the nal components. The drawback of such approach is two-fold. Firstly, communication between stakeholders on a high-level at the early phases of the project is ambiguous, leading to problems and increased overhead e ort at later phases. Secondly, transformation of an abstract model is complex and it involves several errors and manual operations. In contrast, our proposal consists of a two- way approach of model creation and transformation. Both technical and non-technical stakeholders use a common low-level conceptual model to ne-tune requirements, such as a rapid prototype of theWeb application in HTML or other form (bottom-up phase). After several iterations, once the model is enough mature, it is used as an input for the (semi- )automated creation of the nal application's components and its initial content (top-down phase). The proposed approach has been evaluated qualitatively in real-world case studies and quantitatively through a large number of simulated projects using open-source Web appli- cation templates. The achieved results are promising and they show potential improvement in the practical application of model-driven techniques in the Web engineering discipline.