Model-driven development of context-aware Web applications

TLDR

Context‑aware, multi‑channel Web applications are increasingly accepted by providers and consumers, yet few proposals exist for their conceptual modeling. The study presents a conceptual framework that offers modeling facilities for such applications and demonstrates how high‑level constructs can drive development through automatic code generation, emphasizing user‑independent, context‑triggered adaptation actions. The framework is built on WebML, leveraging its established conceptual model, development method, and CASE tool, and its concepts can be adopted independently of the chosen model, method, or tool. The authors claim that the resulting framework is complete and can be adopted independently of the chosen model, method, and tool.

Abstract

Context-aware, multi-channel Web applications are more and more gaining consensus among both content providers and consumers, but very few proposals exist for their conceptual modeling. This article illustrates a conceptual framework that provides modeling facilities for context-aware, multichannel Web applications; it also shows how high-level modeling constructs can drive the application development process through automatic code generation. Our work stresses the importance of user-independent, context-triggered adaptation actions, in which the context plays the role of a “first class” actor , operating independently of users on the same hypertext the users navigate. Modeling concepts are based on WebML (Web Modeling Language), an already established conceptual model for data-intensive Web applications, which is also accompanied by a development method and a CASE tool. However, given their general validity, the concepts of this article shape up a complete framework that can be adopted independently of the chosen model, method, and tool.