Managing the evolution of data-intensive Web applications by model-driven techniques

The adoption of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) in the development of Web Applications permitted to decouple the functional description of applications from the underlying implementation platform. This is of paramount relevance for preserving the intellectual property encoded in models and making applications, languages and processes resilient to technological changes. This paper proposes a model-driven approach for supporting the migration and evolution of data-intensive Web applications. In particular, model differencing techniques are considered to realize a migration facility capable of detecting the modifications a model underwent during its lifecycle and to automatically derive from them the programs that are capable of migrating/adapting also those aspects which are not directly derivable from the source models, as for instance the data persistently stored in a database and the page layout usually written using graphic templates. The approach is validated by considering applications described with the beContent and WebML modeling languages.