MDD inclusion of navigational, structural and RBAC elements for JSF and ASP.NET MVC frameworks in UML models

Educational applications have become complex enterprise web applications. During the design and development of this type of software we have realized the existing modeling approaches were not well suited for the modeling of JSF or ASP.NET MVC applications. This paper extends UML for the modeling of the presentation tier of enterprise applications based on JSF or ASP.NET MVC frameworks. Our main aim was to include navigational, structural and role-based access control (RBAC) elements for JSF/ASP.NET MVC applications in UML class and sequence diagrams built according to multitier patterns. Accordingly, our approach: (i) characterizes the navigational, structural and RBAC elements of JSF/ASP.NET MVC frameworks; (ii) does not define a proprietary notation but provides two platform-specific UML profiles that extend UML-WAE; (iii) is able to include any multitier, service-oriented architecture and security design-level pattern in the models; (iv) provides models whose semantics can be directly translated into code; and therefore, (v) decouples code maintenance from specific tools. This approach has been successfully used in the design of a complex e-learning web application deployed by our research group.