Model-driven Development of Context-Aware Web Applications

Context-aware, multi-channel Web applications are more and more gaining consensus from both content providers and consumers, but very few proposals exist for their conceptual modeling. This paper illustrates a conceptual framework that provides modeling facilities for context-aware, multi-channel 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 from 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 paper shape up a complete framework that can be adopted independently from the chosen model, method, and tool.