Desarrollo De Aplicaciones Web

STUDIA UNIV. BABES–BOLYAI, INFORMATICA, Volume LI, Number 2, 2006 ¸

ON MODEL-DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT FOR WEB APPLICATIONS
˘ IOAN LAZAR AND DAN COJOCAR Abstract. The importance of requirements engineering for web systems is increasing today. Only few methodologies provides a systematic approach for the specification of web systems through requirements models. New results that address modeltransformation from requirements to web system design were recently obtained in the context of using QVT language. In this paper we propose an approach for deriving web system design from requirements models in the context of a model-driven development process. We propose an extension of AndroMDA basic development process that can be suitable also for other model-driven processes. We also extend theAndroMDA presentation profile for modeling conversational flows for web applications.

1. Introduction Current trends in software development focus on the specification of models and model transformations. Model-driven development is a successful methodology for model transformations based on Model Driven Architecture [8]. Model-driven development starts at the computational independent level (CIM) witha business model that capture system requirements. Then the initial CIM model is refined and a platform independent model (PIM) is obtained. Finally, the code is generated by transforming the PIM model into a platform specific model (PSM). In this paper we focus on early steps of model-driven development: obtaining a PIM model from business requirements. Model transformations from requirements toweb system designs were recently investigated by Koch et al [16]. In order to capture web process models they used activity diagrams and introduced an UML profile based on requirements metamodels introduced in [4]. Our approach is different because we focus on using UML 2.0 state machines to express the process models in web applications. In this paper we propose to use standard UML and
Received bythe editors: November 20, 2006. 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification. 68U07, 68U35. 1998 CR Categories and Descriptors. D.2.1 [Requirements/Specification]: Methodologies; D.2.2 [Design Tools and Techniques]: Computer-aided software engineering (CASE), Object-oriented design methods, State diagrams; D.2.11 [Software Architectures]: Domainspecific architectures.
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the extension mechanism provided through stereotypes [10]. The intent is to allow the modeling process to be performed using any modeling tool that conforms to UML 2.0 and UML extension mechanism. State machine models were also used by AndroMDA organization1 which developed several profiles and transformation modules called cartridges. AndroMDA provides also transformation cartridges forStruts [5] (see [2]) and Java Server Faces. We also introduce a new profile that extends AndroMDA profile for presentation layer. This profile allows to model conversational flows in web applications. Moreover the profile is designed such that to allow transformations for other frameworks, such as Spring MVC [1] and Spring WebFlow [3]. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2introduces a new model-driven development process for web applications. A new UML profile for presentation layer is defined in Section 3. Section 4 discusses how the profile and the model-driven development process can be used together. Finally, in Section 5 some conclusions and future work are outlined. 2. Model-Driven Development for Web Applications The basic idea of model-driven development is tobuild platform independent designs and to generate code for specific platforms. Recently Koch et al [16, 4] introduced a model-driven approach for web systems. Their approach are structured around OO-H method [7, 14] and UWE [12, 11, 13, 15]. The PIM models used by the authors are: • Process model – defines business processes/workflows using UML activities. This is the main model from which the...