MVC-Webflow: An AJAX Tool for Online Modeling of MVC-2 Web Applications

Modern Web applications are characterized by a high level of complexity and deal with huge amounts of data. When the application grows in complexity, manual code development is not suitable, because it lacks in efficiency, reuse, reliability, maintainability, and group work facilities. On the other hand, several Web engineering approaches are too far away from the average developer and designer way of working to be widely adopted. In this demonstration paper we propose a light-weight design notation (with its companion editing tool) that leads to the development of MVC applications. We present an on-line visual editing tool called MVC-Webflow for the specification of simple conceptual models for MVC applications and we provide partial automatic code generation, that can be performed on the flight directly on the deployed application. The advantages of the approach are the closeness to the well known MVC paradigm, the foundation on solid web engineering models.