Towards a software engineering approach to Web site development

The World Wide Web (WWW) has become "the" global infrastructure for delivering information and services. The demands and expectations of information providers and consumers are pushing WWW technology towards higher-level quality of presentation, including active contents and improved usability of the hypermedia distributed infrastructure. This technological evolution, however, is not supported by adequate Web design methodologies. Web site development is usually carried out without following a well-defined process and lacks suitable tool support. In addition, Web technologies are quite powerful but rather low-level and their semantics is often left largely unspecified. As a consequence, understanding the conceptual structure of a complex Web site and managing its evolution are complex and difficult tasks. The approach we advocate here is based on sound software engineering principles. The Web site development process goes through requirements analysis, design, and implementation in a high-level language. We define an object-oriented modeling framework, called WOOM, which provides constructs and abstractions for a high-level implementation of a Web site. An important feature of WOOM is that it clearly separates the data that are presented through the site from the context in which the user accesses such data. This feature not only enhances separation of concerns in the design stage, but also favors its subsequent evolution. The paper provides a view of the approach and of its current prototype implementation.