M3D: a tool for the model driven development of web applications

Nowadays, Web Applications (WAs) are complex software systems, used by multiple users with different roles and often developed to support and manage business processes. Due to the changing nature of the supported processes, WAs need to be easily and quickly modified, to adapt and align them to the processes they support. In recent years, Model Driven Engineering (MDE) approaches have been proposed and used to develop and evolve WAs. However, the definition of appropriate MDE approaches for the development of flexible process-centric WAs is still limited. In particular, (flexible) workflow models have never been integrated with the models (e.g., presentation, information models) used in MDE approaches to develop this type of applications. In this paper, we present M3D (Model Driven Development with Declare), a tool for developing WAs that integrates three MDE metamodels used to represent the main components of a WA with the metamodel of Declare, a declarative language to model business processes. The tool exploits and combines the declarative nature of Declare and the advantages of MDE to get an efficient roundtrip engineering support to develop and evolve flexible process-centric WAs.