The exponential growth and capillar diffusion of the Web are nurturing a novel generation of applications, characterized by a direct business-to-customer relationship. The development of such applications is a hybrid between traditional IS development and Hypermedia authoring, and challenges the existing tools and approaches for software production. This paper investigates the current situation of Web development tools, both in the commercial and research fields, by identifying and characterizing different categories of solutions, evaluating their adequacy to the requirements of Web application development, enlightening open problems, and exposing possible future trends.
While Web applications evolve towards ubiquitous, enterprise-wide or multi-enterprise information systems, they face new requirements, such as the capability of managing complex processes spanning multiple users and organizations, by interconnecting software provided by different organizations. Significant efforts are currently being invested in application integration, to support the composition of business processes of different companies, so as to create complex, multi-party business scenarios. In this setting, Web applications, which were originally conceived to allow the user-to-system dialogue, are extended with Web services, which enable system-to-system interaction, and with process control primitives, which permit the implementation of the required business constraints. This paper presents new Web engineering methods for the high-level specification of applications featuring business processes and remote services invocation. Process-and service-enabled Web applications benefit from the high-level modeling and automatic code generation techniques that have been fruitfully applied to conventional Web applications, broadening the class of Web applications that take advantage of these powerful software engineering techniques. All the concepts presented in this paper are fully implemented within a CASE tool.
In this article we present an approach to integrity maintenance, consisting of automatically generating production rules for integrity enforcement. Constraints are expressed as particular formulas of Domain Relational Calculus; they are automatically translated into a set of repair actions, encoded as production rules of an active database system. Production rules may be redundant (they enforce the same constraint in different ways) and conflicting (because repairing one constraint may cause the violation of another constraint). Thus, it is necessary to develop techniques for analyzing the properties of the set of active rules and for ensuring that any computation of production rules after any incorrect transaction terminates and produces a consistent database state. Along these guidelines, we describe a specific architecture for constraint definition and enforcement. The components of the architecture include a Rule Generator , for producing all possible repair actions, and a Rule Analyzer and Selector , for producing a collection of production rules such that their execution after an incorrect transaction always terminates in a consistent state (possibly by rolling back the transaction); moreover, the needs of applications are modeled, so that integrity-enforcing rules reach the final state that better represents the original intentions of the transaction's supplier. Specific input from the designer can also drive the process and integrate or modify the rules generated automatically by the method. Experimental results of a prototype implementation of the proposed architecture are also described.
This paper describes a methodology for the development of WWW applications and a tool environment specifically tailored for the methodology. The methodology and the development environment are based upon models and techniques already used in the hypermedia, information systems, and software engineering fields, adapted and blended in an original mix. The foundation of the proposal is the conceptual design of WWW applications, using HDM-lite, a notation for the specification of structure, navigation, and presentation semantics. The conceptual schema is then translated into a "traditional" database schema, which describes both the organization of the content and the desired navigation and presentation features. The WWW pages can therefore be dynamically generated from the database content, following the navigation requests of the user. A CASE environment, called Autoweb System, offers a set of software tools, which assist the design and the execution of a WWW application, in all its different aspects. Real-life experiences of the use of the methodology and of the Autoweb System in both the industrial and academic context are reported.
Significant efforts are currently invested in application integration, to enable business processes of different companies to interact and compose complex multi-party processes. Web service standards, based on WSDL, have been adopted as process-to-process communication paradigms. However, the conceptual modeling of applications using Web services has not yet been addressed. Interaction with Web services is often specified at the level of the source code; thus, Web service interfaces are buried within a programmatic specification.In this paper, we argue that Web services should be considered as first-class citizens in the specification of Web applications. Thus, service-enabled Web applications should benefit from the high-level modeling and automatic code generation techniques that have been long advocated for Web application design and implementation. To this purpose, we extend a declarative model for specifying data-intensive Web applications in two directions: (i) high-level modeling of Web services and their interactions with the Web application using them; (ii) modeling and specification of Web applications implementing new, complex Web services.Our approach is fully implemented within a CASE tool allowing the high-level modeling and automatic deployment of service-enabled Web applications.2
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