Argo Uml Uwe

© Copyright EMSISE’03

ArgoUWE: A CASE Tool for Web Applications
Alexander Knapp, Nora Koch, Flavia Moser and Gefei Zhang1
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany {knapp,kochn,moser,zhangg@informatik.uni-muenchen.de}
Abstract. The UWE methodology provides a systematic approach for the development of Web applications. UWE is based on a conservative extension of the UML and comprisesthe separate modeling of the conceptual, navigational and presentational aspects of Web applications. We present the CASE tool ArgoUWE to support the design phase of the UWE development process. It is implemented as a plugin module of the open source ArgoUML modeling tool. ArgoUWE fully integrates the UWE metamodel and provides an XMI extension. The construction process of Web applications issupported by incorporating the semi-automatic UWE development steps as well as the OCL well-formedness rules of the UWE metamodel that allow the designer to check the consistency of the UWE models during editing. ArgoUWE is part of the OpenUWE tool environment for model-driven generation of Web applications. Keywords. CASE Tools for IS Design and Implementation, Web Design, Web Engineering, UML, OCL1 Introduction
The Web Engineering field is rich in design methods supporting the complex task of designing Web applications. From our point of view the usability requirements to such methods are the following: to be based on standards, to define a process for the systematic development of Web applications and to provide tool support for the model-driven design and generation of Webapplications. The well-known standard used for modeling is the Unified Modeling Language [UML 2003]. Most of the existing Web engineering methods fulfill some of these usability requirements, but not all of them. Interesting approaches for the systematic development supported by CASE-tools are those for the method OO-H process [Gomez et al. 2001] and for the modeling language WebML [Ceri et al. 2002].Conallen [2003] proposes an extension of UML for a more architecture-oriented and implementation-based approach. The main focus of our UML-based Web Engineering (UWE) methodology is to stick to the use of standards in the systematic design followed by a semi-automatic generation of Web applications fulfilling this way as close as possible the usability requirements we enumerated above. First, asindicated by its name, UWE is UML compliant. Second, UWE defines a systematic development process that can be performed semi-automatically. Third, the tool support is guaranteed by the OpenUWE model-driven development environment that comprises at the current implementation state two CASE tools: ArgoUWE to aid the design and UWEXML to generate Web applications automatically. The focus of this work is thepresentation of the tool ArgoUWE2 describing the underlying UWE concepts, the functionality provided to the users of this tool and its architecture. The complete description of the UWE notation and the UWE process is not within the scope of this article, but can be found in [Koch & Kraus 2002]. The UWE methodology covers structure modeling as well as behavior modeling of Web applications. ArgoUWE,however, until now provides support to structural modeling only, therefore we limit ourselves to the presentation of these aspects.

This work has been partially supported by the European Union within the IST project AGILE (IST-2001-32747), the DFG project InOpSys (WI 841/6-1) and the BMBF project MMISS (08NM070D).
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http://www.pst.informatik.uni-muenchen.de/projekte/argouwe

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©Copyright EMSISE’03

ArgoUWE is built as a conservative extension of a plugin module for ArgoUML3. The main advantage we see in an ArgoUML-based tool is the fact that it is an open source tool that provides a module plugin concept. To remark is that metamodeling plays a fundamental role in CASE tool construction and is also the core of the automatic generation. We have defined an easily...