Model-Driven Development of Dynamic Web Applications

The World-Wide Web is increasingly used as a means for accessing on-line applications, although
the Web was initially created to access documents. In contrast to data-intensive Web sites,
dynamic Web applications are Web-based business applications that execute business logic for
changing the business state captured by the system. Due to the central roles of business logic, it is
important for the dynamic Web applications to be modeled focusing on not only the client-side
presentation, but also the server-side processing such as execution of business logic and page-flow
control. This paper proposes Web Application Descriptor (WAD) for modeling dynamic Web
applications called , and presents a prototype of Web Application Development Support Tooling
(WAST) workbench, which is an environment for developing Web applications based on the
WAD model. The WAD is to specify a navigational structure of Web applications, and prescribe
the behavior of Web applications in terms of logical pages and actions used for directing the page
flow. WAD allows to model such page navigation flow at a description level independent of
neither view contents, business logic, nor runtime application framework, so that it can be
exploited for the conceptual design and execution dynamic of Web applications.