Vol.5 No.2 June 1, 2006  
 

Editorial  (pp091-092)
        D. Lowe   

Research articles: 
A COSMIC-FFP Approach to Predict Web Application Development Effort (pp093-120)
        G. Costagliola, S. Di Martino, F. Ferrucci, C. Gravino, G. Tortora, and G. Vitiello
We describe an approach to predict Web application development effort, which is based on the main ideas underlying COSMIC-FFP (Cosmic Full Function Point). The method is focused on counting data movements and turns out to be suitable for capturing the specific aspects of dynamic Web applications, which are characterized by data movements to and from Web servers. It is based on two measures that can be applied to analysis and design documentation in order to provide early estimations. We also describe the empirical analysis which has been carried out to verify the usefulness of the approach for predicting Web application development effort.

The WebSA Approach: Applying Model Driven Engineering to Web Applications (pp121-149)
        S. Meliá and J. Gómez
The Web engineering research community has proposed several Web design methods that have proven successful in the specification of the functional aspects (such as domain, navigation and presentation) posed by Web applications. However, the architectural aspects are often ignored in the design and the Web application is not specified enough. This development process produces a gap between the Web design models and the final implementation. To overcome this limitation, we extend the different Web methodologies with a generic approach called WebSA. WebSA is based on the Model Driven Engineering (MDE) paradigm that promotes models as the primary artifacts needed to carry out a software project from beginning to end. To do this, WebSA proposes a Model Driven Development made up of a set of UML architectural models and QVT model transformations as a mechanism for (1) integrating the functional aspects of the current Web methodologies with the architectural models as well as for (2) defining a set of transformations from the architectural models to platform-specific models such as J2EE, .NET, etc. To illustrate our approach, in this paper we combine WebSA with the OO-H method, to tackle the design of a running example such as the Travel Agency system.

Identifying Cloned Navigational Patterns in Web Applications (pp150-174)
        A. De Lucia, R. Francese, G. Scanniello, and G. Tortora
Web Applications are subject to continuous and rapid evolution. Often programmers indiscriminately duplicate Web pages without considering systematic development and maintenance methods. This practice creates code clones that make Web Applications hard to maintain and reuse. We present an approach to identify duplicated functionalities in Web Applications through cloned navigational pattern analysis. Cloned patterns can be generalized in a reengineering process, thus to simplify the structure and future maintenance of the Web Applications. The proposed method first identifies pairs of cloned pages by analyzing similarity at structure, content, and scripting code. Two pages are considered clones if their similarity is greater than a given threshold. Cloned pages are then grouped into clusters and the links connecting pages of two clusters are grouped too. An interconnection metric has been defined on the links between two clusters to express the effort required to reengineer them as well as to select the patterns of interest. To further reduce the comprehension effort links and nodes of the clustered navigational schema that do not contribute to the identification of cloned navigational patters are filtered out. A tool supporting the proposed approach has been developed and validated in a case study.

HPG: the Hera Presentation Generator (pp175-200)
        F. Frasincar, G.J. Houben, and P. Barna
This paper presents a model-based design and development environment for Web Information Systems (WISs) using Semantic Web technologies. This environment called the Hera Presentation Generator (HPG) integrates a number of software tools created for the presentation generation phase of the Hera methodology. These tools are the HPG model builders that help constructing the WIS input specifications and the HPG engine that implements the data transformations involved in a WIS. There are two versions of the HPG engine: HPG-XSLT and HPG-Java. HPG-XSLT is characterized by the use of XSLT stylesheets for the data transformations and by the full generation of a Web presentation. HPG-Java uses Java code for the data transformations and thus exploits more than HPG-XSLT the RDF(S) semantics captured in the Hera models and builds one-page-at-a-time. Generating one-page-at-a-time is motivated by recent extensions to the Hera methodology in order to better sustain the building of WISs with richer user interaction support (e.g., form-based). Nevertheless, HPG-Java lost the declarativity, simplicity, and reuse capabilities of the XSLT transformation templates. HPG thus fills the existing gap for tool support for the design of WIS using Semantic Web technologies.

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