Web Application Models Are More than Conceptual Models [chapter]

Gustavo Rossi, Daniel Schwabe, Fernando Lyardet
1999 Lecture Notes in Computer Science  
In this paper, we argue that web applications are a particular kind of hypermedia applications and show how to model their navigational structure. We motivate our paper discussing the most important problems in the design of complex Web applications. We argue that if we need to design applications combining hypermedia navigation with complex transactional behaviors (as in E-commerce systems), we need a systematic development approach. We next present the main ideas underlying the
more » ... Hypermedia Design Method (OOHDM). We show that Web applications are built as views of conceptual models. We next present the abstraction primitives we use to design the conceptual and navigational structure of Web applications and describe the view definition language. We introduce navigational contexts as the structuring mechanism for the navigational space. Some further work on designing Web applications with OOHDM is finally presented. Introduction: Web Applications are Hypermedia Applications The emergence of the World Wide Web has made the hypertext paradigm more popular than ever. Web applications combine navigation through a heterogeneous information space with operations querying or affecting that information. The WWW is based on the hypertext paradigm, inasmuch as it is composed of pages (in HTML) which can be linked to each other through URLs (links). Regardless of how a reader has reached a page, he will normally have the option of accessing the pages linked to the current page; by choosing a particular link, he will cause the page pointed to by the link to be exhibited; this process can repeats itself indefinitely. This succession of steps is know as "navigation", and is intrinsic to hypertext, and hence to the WWW. However, this second generation of hypermedia applications is rather different from the first one, in which applications, usually delivered in CD-ROMs, were not supposed to be updated and, in general, were not critical for any organization. Web applications, on the other hand, are constantly modified, are permanently enriched with new services, and new navigation and interface features are added, e.g., according to the organization's marketing policy.
doi:10.1007/3-540-48054-4_20 fatcat:cbk573yycba7vhm4hym7toteja