Integration of business processes in web application models

Abstract

Business processes, regarded as heavy-weighted flows of control consisting of activities and transitions, play an increasingly important role in Web applications. In order to address these business processes, Web methodologies are evolving to support its definition and integration with the Web specific aspects of content, navigation and presentation. This paper presents the modeling support provided for this kind of processes by the Object-Oriented Hypermedia method (OO-H) and the UML-based Web Engineering (UWE) approach. Both methods apply UML use cases and activity diagrams, and supply UML standard modeling extensions. Additionally, the connection mechanisms between the navigation and the process specific modeling elements are discussed. As a representative example to illustrate our approach we present the requirements, analysis and design models for the www.amazon.com Website with focus on the checkout process. Our approach includes requirements and analysis models shared by OO-H and UWE and provides the basis on which each method applies its particular design notation for business processes.