Model-driven design and deployment of service-enabled web applications

Abstract

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

WebRatio BPM: A Tool for Designing and Deploying Business Processes on the Web

“…Upon the same data model, different hypertext models (site views) can be defined (e.g., for different types of users or devices allows specifying also update operations on the underlying data (e.g., the creation, modification and deletion of instances of entities or relationships) or operations performing arbitrary actions (e.g. sending an e-mail, invoking a remote service [9], and so on). Figure 2 shows a simple site view containing two pages, respectively showing the list of houses and a form for searching cars available for leasing.…”

Re-engineering Legacy Web Applications into Rich Internet Applications

“…On top of the data model, WebML allows specifying the business logic and the content/containers composition by means of the hypertext model, whose key ingredients include siteviews, areas, pages, content units, operation units, and links. New entities have been included to treat new challenges like the XML OUT and XML IN ones, which have been used in [12] to marshall and unmarshall data, respectively.…”

“…The full set of constrains to be accomplished by the model in order to be computable to generate the code are also specified in [1]. Both WebML extensions (i.e., [17] and [1]) are used in our work to specify RIA capabilities plus [12] where XML IN and XML OUT units are introduced to cope with marshalling and unmarshalling data into/from a XML file.…”

Process Modeling in Web Applications

“…These features require the use of appropriate WebML units modeling Web service interactions, extensively presented in other works [Manolescu et al 2005], and briefly summarized here.…”