Enhancement of UML-based web engineering for metamodels : homepage development case study

Abstract

Web Engineering is the application of systematic, disciplined and quantifiable approaches to the cost-effective development and evolution of highquality solutions in the web-based applications. UML-Based Web Engineering (UWE) is one of the approaches of web engineering, which provides a standard and systematic approach for the development of Web applications. UWE metamodel is a design considered as the conservative extension of the UML metamodel. In this thesis we used UWE metamodels to develop web homepages, the problem is current UWE cannot support homepage contents directly because UWE metamodels are not enough elements for supporting homepages. The goal of this research is enhancement UWE metamodels to high usability UWE in homepage development. There are two steps in this development process. In the first step, we compared UWE with Object Oriented Hyperlink (OOH) and Web Modeling Language (WebML) to show the strengths and weaknesses of UWE in the development of homepages. In the second step, extended UWE metamodel was proposed eleven elements (six elements for navigation model and five elements for presentation model) to solve these weaknesses to fully support the homepage development process. For the enhanced UWE metamodel, we defined the eleven elements to support the design of homepages, it is fully integrates the UWE metamodel and provides an XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) extension. The construction process of Web applications is supported by incorporating the semi-automatic UWE development steps and the Object Constraint Language (OCL) of the UWE. Finally we compared the enhanced UWE metamodel with the original UWE metamodel by using a case study, and then the result showed capabilities of the eleven elements in UWE metamodel for development website homepages, and become to increase usability UWE metamodels.