Towards a Pragmatic Model Driven Engineering Approach for the Development of CMS-based Web Applications

Most enterprises utilize Web Content Management System (CMS) for the development and maintenance of their web applications. A CMS provides a high quality platform and creates web applications based on software configuration instead of software engineering from scratch. Although there are numerous advantages to implementing a CMS, there are two downsides not solved: for complex applications there is still a need for software developers and architects to configure the software based on business-user requirements, and there is no easy way to see how the application is implemented. This paper presents a pragmatic Model Driven Engineering method that allows the business-users to create CMSbased web applications themselves based on a business model without the need for software engineering and architects. With these business-users in mind, we minimized complexity by implementing only the modeling tools they need resulting in a useful web form diagram. The web form diagram allows business users to model generic business processes which are transformed into a CMS-specific configuration. The web form Diagram is implemented in a CASE environment a validated by means of a case study and an end user evaluation.