A User Interface Stereotype to Build Web Portals

Software Engineering for Web Systems domain is a complex process where reuse and productivity are desirable attributes. It involves, among other aspects, modeling user interface (UI) software and its binding to underlying applications business logic and process. Despite recent advances, UI engineering for this domain is still expensive, laborious, and error-prone. On the other hand, Model-Driven Development (MDD) has emerged as a paradigm to bridge reuse and productivity gaps by means of abstract models and automatic software generation through model transformations. However, model-based UI engineering (or MDD for UI) is still an emerging discipline. This paper applies a recent MDD for UI research advance, namely the UI Stereotype, to the UI engineering in the Web Systems domain. The UI Stereotype captures UI specificities, modeling recurrent UI presentation and behavior, abstracting users´ interactions and tasks. We apply this concept to describe a Web Portal UI Stereotype as a recurrent interaction pattern that enables the automatic generation of many Web Portal UI components based on model-driven practices. This UI generation approach is compliant with recent advances in UI construction, such as Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML), a UI modeling language recently standardised by OMG. Moreover, our approach reduces Web Portals UI software development time-to-market, efforts and costs, contributing to both quality and productivity, and improving maintainability of Web applications.