Supporting compositional reuse in component-based web engineering

Abstract

The World Wide Web's anticipated scope as an environment for knowledge exchange has changed dramatically. Without major modifications to its primary mechanisms the Web has turned into a platform for distributed applications. The originally simple and well-defined coarse-grained implementation model of the Web now hinders Web application development. Fine-grained development artifacts, design patterns, and other well-established Software Engineering methods are hard to reuse in the Web after they have found their way into implementation resources. The application of Software Engineering practice to development for the Web, which is also referred to as Web Engineering, and especially the systematic reuse of components for Web-application development at low-costs is a main goal to achieve. This paper presents a systematic approach to code reuse with the WebComposition Repository, which is an essential tool for retrieval and classification of large component sets. The Repository's architecture is crafted to support multiple representation and classification approaches. It facilitates reuse in component-based Web Engineering. © 2000 ACM.