A Methodology for Model-Driven Web Application Composition

Web application composition can greatly benefit from the utilization of existing frameworks and reusable components, in order to reduce development effort. Frameworks implementing the model-view-controller architectural pattern standardize the development process to a great extent, while business layer components may consist of consumers of existing Web services. On this line of thought a Web application can be seen as a composition of Web services around a user interface flow. In this paper, an approach for the application of model-driven techniques for the automation of the development of such a Web application is presented. Specifically, we present a methodology for the modeling of the application using UML state transition and class diagrams and the generation of the appropriate source code and configuration files. The appropriate UML profiles to assist the service design are defined and the final transformation is performed exploiting model parsing tools.