Meeting the challenges of Web application development: the web engineering approach

The Web has very rapidly become central to many applications in diverse areas. As our reliance on Web-based applications continues to increase and the Web systems supporting these applications become more complex, there is growing concern about the manner in which the Web-based systems/applications are created and their quality, integrity and maintainability. The development of Web-based systems has generally been ad hoc, resulting in poor quality and maintainability. In the recent times, there have been many failures of Web applications due to a variety of problems and causes. The way the developers address these problems is critical to deploying successful large-scale Web applications. This paper addresses these issues and offers a holistic approach to managing the complexity of development of Web-based systems and Web applications. It highlights the various real-world issues, challenges and considerations in development of large Web applications, compared to traditional software development, and recommends the Web engineering approach that Web/software developers could follow.