Model Driven Development of Process-centric Web Applications

Despite Model Driven Engineering (MDE) approaches are largely used to develop, update and evolve Web Applications (WAs), the use of these approaches for the development of process-centric WAs is still very limited. This is an important issue in the context of MDE considering that WAs are often used to support users in the execution of business processes. In this paper, we propose the integration of three MDE metamodels used to represent the structure of information, service and presentation layers of a WA with the metamodel of Declare, a declarative language for business process rapresentation. The declarative nature of Declare allows us to combine an efficient roundtrip engineering support with the advantages of an MDE approach. We present and discuss a case study where the proposed approach is used to develop a typical online shopping application with the aim to validate and verify the feasibility and the effectiveness of the approach.