Fine-grained, structured configuration management for web projects

Researchers in Web engineering have regularly noted that existing Web application development environments provide little support for managing the evolution of Web applications. Key limitations of Web development environments include line-oriented change models that inadequately represent Web document semantics and in ability to model changes to link structure or the set of objects making up the Webapplication. Developers may find it difficult to grasp how theoverall structure of the Web application has changed over time and may respond by using ad hoc solutions that lead to problems of maintain ability, quality and reliability. Web applications are software artifacts, and as such, can benefit from advanced version control and software configuration management (SCM)technologies from software engineering. We have modified an integrated development environment to manage the evolution and maintenance of Web applications. The resulting environment is distinguished by itsfine-grained version control framework, fine-grained Web contentchange management, and product versioning configuration management, in which a Web project can be organized at the logical level and itsstructure and components are versioned in a fine-grained manner aswell. This paper describes the motivation for this environment as well as its user interfaces, features, and implementation.

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