ER 2006 Tutorial

Conceptual Modeling for

Emerging Web Application Technologies

What are the concepts behind state-of-the-art web application frameworks like Websphere on the commercial side or Struts on the open source side? What are the concepts behind emerging formats and technologies like XFORMS, XUL, XAML, Server Faces, Spring?

 

In a web application project, a plenty of advanced technologies must be exploited to get the work done on schedule. At the same time, modeling is an approved best practice. In projects, modeling techniques often must be invented on the fly under the pressure of documentation needs. The resulting ad-hoc modeling techniques then typically lack elaboration and conciseness. Therefore, a high-level understanding of the advanced web application technologies is desired by system analysts and developers.

In this ER 2006 tutorial we analyze web application technologies in the semantically well-defined framework of form-oriented analysis. We identify the underpinnings of new web application technologies in terms of approved concepts of the modeling community. For example, a web form turns out to be an editable method call, the ubiquitous Model-2-Architecture for web applications turns out to be functional decomposition. On the basis of the viewpoint of a strict submit/response style system, the participant of this tutorial should be empowered to decide which work products are appropriate in his or her concrete project and which details of advanced technologies should actually have a footprint in the system documentation. No single solution fits all sizes - web application projects range from little web shops for a dozen of products to huge business-to-customer portals involving many CRM-related aspects. To trigger the discussion, we propose a well-defined set of documents and work-products for a standard, medium-size web application project. We give the model of an example web shop as a comprehensive example and discuss real-world case studies.

 

 

The participants receive a set of all tutorial slides. The participants also receive a booklet with the fully elaborated web shop model that is discussed in the tutorial.

As an option, each participant can buy a copy of the Springer book "Form-Oriented Analysis - A New Methodology to Model Form-Based Applications" of Dirk Draheim and Gerald Weber for further reading. The book is not necessary for to follow the tutorial.

www.formcharts.org

Intended Audience

The tutorial is open to working software engineers and decision makers that are involved in web application projects. It also targets researchers in the field of Software Engineering that are interested in a high-level overview on new web technologies. The participants should have some basic knowledge of dynamic web sites. First-hand experience with CASE tools is helpful. Related work is explained on the fly, so that each participant can follow all arguments.

Furthermore, additional material is available online at:

Tutorial Presenters

Dirk Draheim holds a Diploma in computer science from the  Technische Universität Berlin since 1994 and a PhD in computer science from the Freie Universität Berlin since 2002. In summer 2006 he is lecturer in HCI at the University of Auckland and in winter 2006 he is lecturer in Software Engineering at the University of Mannheim. He is member of the ACM.

Gerald Weber holds a Diploma in mathematics and a PhD in computer science from the Freie Universität Berlin. From 1995 until 2002 he worked as a freelance consultant for technology, for

example, for the IT department of the German Railway Company. Since 2003 he is lecturer at the University of Auckland. Together with Dirk Draheim he is program committee chair of TEAA 2006 -2nd International Conference on Trends of Enterprise Application Architecture.

Gerald Weber  is member of IEEE.

draheim@acm.org

g.weber@cs.auckland.ac.nz