Systematic evolution of WebML models by coupled transformations

Abstract

Model-driven Web Engineering is an effective approach for improving the development of Web applications by providing appropriate abstraction mechanisms and different viewpoints. However, maintaining existing Web models still presents some significant research challenges. In particular, maintenance and evolution tasks are based on fine-grained atomic changes, and there is no automated reconciliation support for change propagation among viewpoints. In this paper we present an approach based on coupled transformations to ease the evolution of content models and the corresponding reconciliation of dependent hypertext models. The approach is illustrated by using the well-known ExtractClass refactoring for WebML models. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.