OO-H Method: extending UML to model web interfaces

The mostly "creative" authoring process used to develop many Web applications during the last years has already proven unsuccessful to tackle, with its increasing complexity, both in terms of user and technical requirements. This fact has nurtured a mushrooming of proposals, most based on conceptual models, that aim at facilitating the development, maintenance and assessment of Web applications, thus improving the reliability of the Web development process.In this chapter, we will show how traditional software engineering approaches can be extended to deal with the Web idiosyncrasy, taking advantage of proven successful notation and techniques for common tasks, while adding models and constructs needed to capture the nuances of the Web environment. In this context, our proposal, the Object-Oriented Hypermedia (OO-H) Method, developed at University of Alicante, provides a set of new views that extend UML to provide a Web interface model. A code generation process is able to, departing from such diagrams and their associated tagged values, generate a Web interface capable of connecting to underlying business modules.