Managing the evolution of Web-based applications with WebSCM

In traditional software, engineering tools, software configuration management (SCM) is the dominant approach to manage the evolution of a software system. However, the evolution of Web-based applications presents special challenges that have not been well addressed by existing SCM systems. They often treat hyperlinked Web documents as a set of text files in a file .system and disregard crucial structures in a Web-based application such as internal structure, navigational structure, logical structure, and compositional structure among Web objects. Key limitations include their inadequacy to represent Web object semantics and their inability to manage changes to those important structures among objects making up a Web application. This paper presents a novel SCM-centered development environment for Web-based applications, named WebSCM. With WebSCM, Web developers can manage fine-grained, structural evolution of Web objects and important structures among them at different levels of abstraction (e.g. conceptual, navigational, presentation, and implementation levels). This paper also describes the motivation for this environment as well as its user interfaces, features, and implementation.