Systematic Development of Complex Web-Based User Interfaces

Software components realising the graphical user interface (GUI) of a highly interactive system or the user interface of a Web application form an essential part of the entire implementation and significantly affect the effectiveness and maintainability of the software system. In this paper, we propose a software engineering based approach for the development of complex Web-based user interfaces (Web-UIs). The method comprises two basic tasks. The first task gathers and models the UI requirements. The second task maps the UI requirements model into a Web-UI software architecture. To this end, we propose DAWID (DIWA-based Web User Interface Development), an approach that adapts the DIWA framework for GUI development to Web-UIs. Since DIWA consequently applies fundamental software engineering (SE) principles and its adaption to Web-UIs requires only minimal changes, the resulting DAWID architecture also stays fully compliant with the SE principles.