A survey on web modeling approaches for ubiquitous web applications

Abstract

PurposeUbiquitous web applications (UWA) are a new type of web applications which are accessed in various contexts, i.e. through different devices, by users with various interests, at anytime from anyplace around the globe. For such full‐fledged, complex software systems, a methodologically sound engineering approach in terms of model‐driven engineering (MDE) is crucial. Several modeling approaches have already been proposed that capture the ubiquitous nature of web applications, each of them having different origins, pursuing different goals and providing a pantheon of concepts. This paper aims to give an in‐depth comparison of seven modeling approaches supporting the development of UWAs.Design/methodology/approachThis methodology is conducted by applying a detailed set of evaluation criteria and by demonstrating its applicability on basis of an exemplary tourism web application. In particular, five commonly found ubiquitous scenarios are investigated, thus providing initial insight into the modeling concepts of each approach as well as to facilitate their comparability.FindingsThe results gained indicate that many modeling approaches lack a proper MDE foundation in terms of meta‐models and tool support. The proposed modeling mechanisms for ubiquity are often limited, since they neither cover all relevant context factors in an explicit, self‐contained, and extensible way, nor allow for a wide spectrum of extensible adaptation operations. The provided modeling concepts frequently do not allow dealing with all different parts of a web application in terms of its content, hypertext, and presentation levels as well as their structural and behavioral features. Finally, current modeling approaches do not reflect the crosscutting nature of ubiquity but rather intermingle context and adaptation issues with the core parts of a web application, thus hampering maintainability and extensibility.Originality/valueDifferent from other surveys in the area of modeling web applications, this paper specifically considers modeling concepts for their ubiquitous nature, together with an investigation of available support for MDD in a comprehensive way, using a well‐defined as well as fine‐grained catalogue of more than 30 evaluation criteria.

Animated transitions for empowering interactive information systems

“…Adaptation of a web application typically falls into two categories depending on who is in control of the adaptation process [13]: adaptivity when the web application is responsible for adapting itself [9,10], adaptable when the end user is responsible for adapting the web application by means provided by this application [7], and mixed-initiative when the responsibility is shared between the web application and the end user [13]. Adapting a web application obviously represents an important opportunity for several stakeholders [8,10,37,43]:…”

“…Adaptation can be effectively and efficiently applied to a wide variety of human activity domains. Potential benefits include improving [29]: usability, user experience, navigation, task completion time,… ─ Designers: several methods exist that support designers in conducting web engineering (e.g., [23,37,43] all provide extensive and interesting comparison and survey of major web engineering methods), but only some of them support adaptation explicitly, with varying levels of granularity, context-awareness [43]. ─ Developers: adaptation can be developed for many different types of web applications ranging from simple HTML pages [8] until Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) [22]; several User Interface Description Languages (UIDLs) [49] could provide developers with developing facilities for producing various interfaces for various contexts of use from a set of models [34]; the complexity of software architectures for supporting adaptation could vary depending on the sophistication of context-awareness [4], thus making it more complex for developers [50,52].…”

Aspect-oriented adaptation specification in web information systems: a semantics-based approach

“…Finally, we point the interested reader to a recent survey on ubiquitous applications, containing details on most of the methods discussed above (Schwinger 2008).…”

A UML Profile for OData Web APIs

“…MDE aims to address platform complexity by using models and model transformations for the specification/generation of software artifacts. Thus, MDE techniques have been increasingly used to automate the generation of Web applications [8,11,2,12,3,7,6,9]. While these existing MDE approaches cover a variety of technologies (e.g.…”