Model-driven development of context-aware Web applications

Abstract

Context-aware, multi-channel Web applications are more and more gaining consensus among both content providers and consumers, but very few proposals exist for their conceptual modeling. This article illustrates a conceptual framework that provides modeling facilities for context-aware, multichannel Web applications; it also shows how high-level modeling constructs can drive the application development process through automatic code generation. Our work stresses the importance of user-independent, context-triggered adaptation actions, in which the context plays the role of a “first class” actor , operating independently of users on the same hypertext the users navigate. Modeling concepts are based on WebML (Web Modeling Language), an already established conceptual model for data-intensive Web applications, which is also accompanied by a development method and a CASE tool. However, given their general validity, the concepts of this article shape up a complete framework that can be adopted independently of the chosen model, method, and tool.