Survey of Existing Languages to Model Interactive Web Applications

Wright, J. and Dietrich, J.

Over the last few years, the web is establishing increased importance in society with the rise of social networking sites and the semantic web, facilitated and driven by the popularity of client-side scripting commonly known as AJAX. These allow extended functionality and more interactivity in web applications. Engineering practices dictate that we need to be able to model these applications. However, languages to model web applications have fallen behind, with most existing web modelling languages still solely focused on the hypertext structure of web sites, with little regard for user interaction or common web-specific concepts. This paper provides an overview of technologies in use in today's web applications, along with some concepts we propose are necessary to model these. We present a brief survey of existing web modelling languages including WebML, UWE, W2000 and OOWS, along with a discussion of their capability to describe these new modelling approaches. Finally, we discuss the possibilities of extending an existing language to handle these new concepts.

Cite as: Wright, J. and Dietrich, J. (2008). Survey of Existing Languages to Model Interactive Web Applications. In Proc. Fifth Asia-Pacific Conference on Conceptual Modelling (APCCM 2008), Wollongong, NSW, Australia. CRPIT, 79. Hinze, A. and Kirchberg, M., Eds. ACS. 113-123.

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