Use-case components for interactive information systems

Specification-oriented components (SOC’s) are designed to facilitate the implementation of a system directly from its specifications. An earlier study has shown cases in which SOC’s enabled information systems to be implemented with considerably less code than when implemented with components designed by a typical object-oriented approach. This study goes a further step by considering the essence of an information system to be the flow and processing of data. The components based on this abstraction attempt to hide code that is not implementing data flow or data processing. Based on this approach, an experimental framework called WebSI has been developed. WebSI components hide the code for the construction of the user interface (UI), the database access code and the Web-related code. WebSI was designed to facilitate the manual translation of English language use-case specifications into Java code. WebSI enabled the construction of information systems with a modest amount of code. The similarity between the WebSI-based Java code and the English language use-case specifications facilitated verifying that the code implements the specifications correctly. The automatically produced UI’s were relatively easy to learn and to use. The modification of WebSI-based legacy code was facilitated by the high level of the code and its use-case structure, but remained a labor-intensive task. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.