Discovering Re-usable Design Solutions in Web Conceptual Schemas: Metrics and Methodology

Abstract

Abstract. In the Internet era, the development of Web applications has impressively evolved and is characterized by a large degree of complexity. To this end, software community has proposed a variety of modeling methods and techniques. In this work, we provide a methodology and metrics for mining the conceptual schema of applications, to discover recurrent design solutions in an automatic manner. The mechanism is designed for models based on WebML, a modeling language for designing data-intensive applications. This approach, when applied in an application's conceptual schema, results in effective design solutions, as it facilitates reuse and consistency in the development and maintenance process. Furthermore, when applied to a large number of applications, it enables hypertext architects to identify templates for Web application frameworks for specific domains and to discover new design patterns extending the predefined set of patterns supported by WebML. Finally, we illustrate a validation scenario.

Application modeling using reverse engineering techniques

“…The presented approach only statistically analyzes the web application code and does not incorporate all metrics of [15], which is a direction we already work towards. Further work includes wider experimentation and fine-tuning of the method for more .NET languages.…”

“…Our key aim was to further enable model-clone extraction, maintenance and metric-based evaluation with the further use of our method presented in [15]. As a result we have parsed and transformed the application into a model tree compatible for model-clone extraction.…”

“…The rationale behind this approach lies in the transformation of a web application into a WebML model by means of an intermediary tree (or in fact a directed acyclic graph -DAG data structure), which is compatible with the model-clone recognition approach presented by some of the authors in [15]. The approach in [15], when applied to an application's WebML conceptual schema, results in effective design solutions, as it facilitates reuse and consistency in the development and maintenance process. As a next step, we present in this work a method that allows us to transform existing web applications developed with ASP.NET, into WebML models represented first with the appropriate graph -DAG-to enable further meta-modeling.…”