Decoupling web application concerns through weaving operations

Today's Web applications require instruments and techniques able to face their complexity which has noticeably increased at the expense of productivity and quality factors. A number of design methodologies have been proposed in the process of trying to provide developers with languages and tools to abstract and capture Web applications under orthogonal views, like data, navigation and presentation. While the different modeling language constructs can be unified in a common metamodel, consistency among the distinct concerns is guaranteed by less formal relations. Usually, they are based on name conventions and/or ad hoc tool support that could affect reuse and maintenance ratings of specifications. In order to define rigorous and explicit correspondences between the artifacts produced during a system development, this paper proposes the exploitation of dedicated weaving models. The approach aims at providing structural mappings that do not interfere with the definition of the views on either side achieving a clear separation between them and their connections. Furthermore, following the "everything is a model" principle, this work can enable the use of general-purpose theories and tools. For example, model transformations can be applied to evaluate the given specifications or to derive alternative descriptions like Webile or WebML. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.