Towards a Common Metamodel for the Development of Web Applications

Many different methodologies for the development of Web applications were proposed in the last ten years. Although most of them define their own notation for building models such as the navigation, the presentation or the personalization model, we argue that in many cases it is just another notation for the same concepts, i.e. they should be based on a common metamodel for the Web application domain. In addition, tool-supported design and generation is becoming essential in the development process of Web applications due to the increasing size and complexity of such applications, and CASE-tools should be built on a precisely specified metamodel of the modeling constructs used in the design activities, providing more flexibility if modeling requirements change. This paper presents a first step towards such a common metamodel by defining first a metamodel for the UML-based Web Engineering (UWE) approach. The metamodel is defined as a conservative extension of the UML metamodel. We further discuss how to map the UWE metamodel to the UWE modeling constructs (UML profile) of the design method which was already presented in previous works. The metamodel and this mapping are the core of the extension of the ArgoUML open source CASE-tool we developed to support the UWE design notation and method.