Web applications design evolution with UWA

This paper presents a semi-automatic approach to Web applications design evolution which leverages the Ubiquitous Web Applications (UWA) design framework, a methodology and a set of models and tools for the user-centered design of multi-channels and context-aware Web applications. The approach is based on a two-step redesign process: first a semi-automatic reverse modeling phase analyzes the html pages of the application front-end to abstract a model of the “as-is” design, according to the UWA formalism; second, a forward design phase starts from the recovered models and the (new) requirements available for the application to identify lacks and opportunities of improvements in the “as-is” design and produce the “to-be” version of it. The reverse modeling phase applies clustering and clone detection techniques and is supported by an Eclipse IDE environment. The forward design phase is supported by a set of UWA modeling tools which are built on top of the Eclipse Graphical Editing Framework (GEF) and of the Eclipse Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF) and that allow developers to evolve the recovered models. The results from a concrete case study to assess the validity of the redesign approach are also presented and discussed.