The RE-UWA approach to recover user centered conceptual models from Web applications

Large-scale Web Applications, especially those intended to publish contents and provide information to its users, are by nature subject to continuous and fast changes. This often means fast obsolescence of the design documentation and a lot of effort required to comprehend the application when performing maintenance and evolution tasks. This paper presents a reverse engineering approach for Web Applications enabling the semi-automatic recovery of user-centered conceptual models describing, from a user perspective, key aspects, such as the delivered contents and navigational paths. The abstracted models are formalized according to the Ubiquitous Web Applications (UWA) design methodology, but any other design method for Web Applications could be used instead. The paper describes the recovery process, a tool developed to support the process, and the results from a case study conducted to validate the approach on a set of real world Web Applications.

[1]  Jean Vanderdonckt,et al.  Flexible reverse engineering of web pages with VAQUISTA , 2001, Proceedings Eighth Working Conference on Reverse Engineering.

[2]  Stefano Ceri.  Process Modeling in Web Applications , 2005, OTM Conferences.

[3]  Giuseppe A. Di Lucca,et al.  Reverse engineering Web applications: the WARE approach , 2004, J. Softw. Maintenance Res. Pract..

[4]  Fabio Paternò,et al.  Automatic reconstruction of the underlying interaction design of web applications , 2002, SEKE '02.

[5]  Shihong Huang,et al.  Documenting software systems with views IV: documenting web transaction design with UWAT+ , 2004, SIGDOC '04.

[6]  Tancred Lindholm,et al.  A three-way merge for XML documents , 2004, DocEng '04.

[7]  Sam Chung,et al.  Reverse software engineering with UML for Web site maintenance , 2000, Proceedings of the First International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering.

[8]  Gustavo Rossi,et al.  Model-Driven Development of Web Applications with UWA, MVC and JavaServer Faces , 2007, ICWE.

[9]  Jim Conallen,et al.  Building Web applications with UML , 1999 .

[10]  Gustavo Rossi,et al.  A comprehensive design model for integrating business processes in web applications , 2007, Int. J. Web Eng. Technol..

[11]  Luciano Baresi,et al.  W2000 as a MOF Metamodel , 2002 .

[12]  Paolo Tonella,et al.  Understanding and Restructuring Web Sites with ReWeb , 2001, IEEE Multim..

[13]  Shihong Huang,et al.  Web site evolution via transaction reengineering , 2004, Proceedings. Sixth IEEE International Workshop on Web Site Evolution.

[14]  Mario Luca Bernardi,et al.  Reverse engineering of Web Applications to abstract user-centered conceptual models , 2008, 2008 10th International Symposium on Web Site Evolution.

[15]  Jean-Luc Hainaut,et al.  A tool-supported method to extract data and schema from Web sites , 2003, Fifth IEEE International Workshop on Web Site Evolution, 2003. Theme: Architecture. Proceedings..

[16]  Giuseppe A. Di Lucca,et al.  Comprehending Web applications by a clustering based approach , 2002, Proceedings 10th International Workshop on Program Comprehension.

[17]  Stefano Ceri,et al.  Web Modeling Language (WebML): a modeling language for designing Web sites , 2000, Comput. Networks.

[18]  Massimiliano Di Penta,et al.  An approach to identify duplicated web pages , 2002, Proceedings 26th Annual International Computer Software and Applications.

[19]  Franca Garzotto.  Ubiquitous Web Applications , 2001, ADBIS.

[20]  Nora Koch,et al.  The Expressive Power of UML-based Web Engineering1 , 2002 .

[21]  Giuseppe A. Di Lucca,et al.  Recovering a business object model from a Web applications , 2003, Proceedings 27th Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference. COMPAC 2003.

[22]  Gustavo Rossi,et al.  An Object Oriented Approach to Web-Based Applications Design , 1998, Theory Pract. Object Syst..

[23]  Ioana Manolescu,et al.  Process modeling in Web applications , 2005, TSEM.