Smart business objects for web applications: A new approach to model business objects

Abstract

At present, there is a growing need to accelerate the development of web applications and to support continuous evolution of web applications due to evolving business needs. The object persistence capability and web interface generation capability in contemporary MVC (Model View Controller) web application development frameworks and model-to-code generation capability in Model-Driven Development tools has simplified the modelling of business objects for developing web applications. However, there is still a mismatch between the current technologies and the essential support for high-level, semantic-rich modelling of web-ready business objects for rapid development of modern web applications. Therefore, we propose a novel concept called Smart Business Object (SBO) to solve the above-mentioned problem. In essence, SBOs are web-ready business objects. SBOs have high-level, web-oriented attributes such as email, URL, video, image, document, etc. This allows SBO to be modelled at a higher-level of abstraction than traditional modelling approaches. A lightweight, near-English modelling language called SBOML (Smart Business Object Modelling Language) is proposed to model SBOs. We have created a toolkit to streamline the creation (modelling) and consumption (execution) of SBOs. With these tools, we are able to build fully functional web applications in a very short time without any coding.