Roberto Rodríguez-Echeverría

Modernization of legacy web applications into rich internet applications

In the last years one of the main concerns of the software industry has been to reengineer their legacy Web Applications (WAs) to take advantage of the benefits introduced by Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), such as enhanced user interaction and network bandwith optimization. However, those reengineering processes have been traditionally performed in an ad-hoc manner, resulting in very expensive and error-prone projects. This situation is partly motivated by the fact that most of the legacy WAs were developed before Model-Driven Development (MDD) approaches became mainstream. Then maintenance activities of those legacy WAs have not been yet incorporated to a MDA development lifecycle. OMG Architecture Driven Modernization (ADM) advocates for applying MDD principles to formalize and standardize those reengineering processes with modernization purposes. In this paper we outline an ADM-based WA-to-RIA modernization process, highlighting the special characteristics of this modernization scenario.

Automatic Generation of RIAs Using RUX-Tool and Webratio

This work describes RUX-Tool, an MDD-based tool that gives support to the modeling and automatic code generation of User Interfaces for Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) with multidevice and multiplatform capabilities. This tool is mainly thought to be used with other tools based on Web methodologies such as it is the case of WebRatio that automatically generates the content structure and the business logic.

Providing RIA user interfaces with accessibility properties

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) technologies are challenging the way in which the Web is being developed. However, from the UI accessibility point of view, these technologies pose new challenges that the Web Accessibility Initiative of the W3C is trying to solve through the use of a standard specification for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA). Currently, the introduction of properties defined in WAI-ARIA is being done in an ad-hoc manner due to the lack of models, methodologies and tools to support the design of accessible RIA UIs. In this paper we propose a semantic approach to deal with this modeling issue by extending the RUX-Method, a model-based method to build RIA UIs. The approach includes the validation process of the accessibility issues at two different levels: the UI structure and the interactions behavior.

Re-engineering legacy web applications into rich internet applications

There is a current trend in the industry to migrate its traditional Web applications to Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). To face this migration, traditional Web methodologies are being extended with new RIA modeling primitives. However, this re-engineering process is being figured out in an adhoc manner by introducing directly these new features in the models, crosscutting the old functionality and compromising the readability, reusability and maintainability of the whole system. With the aim of performing this reengineering process more systematic and less error prone we propose in this paper an approach based on separation of concerns applied to the specific case of WebML.

A model-driven approach for reusing tests in smart home systems

The continuous advances of ubiquitous and pervasive computing have contributed to the successful increase in smart home systems. However, usually these systems are developed at a lower abstraction level very tied to specific technologies. Model-driven approaches have emerged to tackle the design of these systems, improving their reusability and maintainability and decreasing their complexity. Nevertheless, the existing model-driven approaches to develop smart home systems do not cover the whole development process, and testing activities are still relegated to the final programming stages, reducing their reusability for different technologies or platforms. Some approaches have proposed the incorporation of testing activities into the model-driven process. However, the test models defined are very tied to the specific systems and they must be redesigned for every new system to test, reducing thus the reusability of the test behavior. In this setting, this paper presents a process to define reusable tests that may be automatically applied to different smart home systems. The process is integrated into a whole MDD approach that provides support for the modeling of smart home systems at two different abstraction levels, ensuring the reusability of tests also for different smart home platforms.

A model-driven process to modernize legacy web applications based on service oriented architectures

Web applications (WAs) developed by companies are usually adapted to cover new business rules due to continuous changes in the organization requirements. Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) come to the scene to give a solution to these continuous changes providing a way to align business rules with underlying services. This is why there is a current trend to migrate legacy web applications to new SOAs. However, this migration requires the identification, publication and orchestration of the underlying service layer. These are complex tasks usually carried out ad hoc by manually defining and developing the service layer and its coordination. Moreover, these processes are usually performed at a low abstraction level, close to code, hindering reusability and maintainability of the obtained system. Model-Driven techniques aim at tackling the complexity of these processes since models drive the migration from a higher abstraction level. In that sense, this paper presents a Model-Driven systematic and semiautomatic process to modernize legacy WAs to SOAs. It also relies on techniques that are used to identify and classify the services offered by the different WAs of the organization. On the one hand, conceptual representations of the WAs and the service oriented architecture are obtained. On the other hand, the underlying services of the web applications are generated from models so that they may be offered as an interoperable service layer, which may be aligned with the company business rules and orchestrated with external services.

Designing Cooperative Social Applications in Healthcare by Means of SocialBPM

The appearance of the so-called first-generation of social tools such as blogs, wikis or CMS made possible for the Web to be used as an interaction arena for healthcare purposes. Currently, this interaction has been improved by means of different social networks such as PatientsLikeMe, HealthVault or Inspire, just to cite a few. The business world, not to be left behind, is rapidly catching up with this change in interpersonal communications, allowing third parties (clients, patients, colleagues, providers, etc) to participate in the process execution by performing social operations such as voting, commenting, ranking, sharing, following, inviting, etc. However, this integration is being done in an ad-hoc manner, not existing understandable notations to include social interactions in Business Process Modelling (BPM). Moreover, the user has to face several social applications to perform simple social tasks, i.e., scheduling a meeting and sharing a diagnostic must be done through different applications. While the former problem affects the design phase, the latter affects the execution phase. In this paper we present a case study in order to illustrate how the use of SocialBPM solves these problems, where SocialBPM denotes to the combination of social technologies and BPM. SocialBPM eases both, the cooperative design of social processes, and their cooperative execution.

Generation of WebML hypertext models from legacy Web Applications

In the last years one of the main concerns of the software industry has been to reengineer their legacy Web Applications (WAs) to take advantage of the benefits introduced by Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). In this context, Model Driven (MD) Web Engineering approaches have been extended with new modeling primitives to obtain the benefits provided by RIA features. However, during the last decade, widespread language-specific Web frameworks have supported actual Web system development. In this paper we present a MD reverse engineering process to obtain a conceptual representation of the navigational concern of a legacy Web application (LWA), as an initial step within a LWA-to-RIA modernization process. WebML is selected as the target MD Web Engineering approach.

Extracting navigational models from struts-based web applications

Nowadays, there is a current trend in software industry to modernize traditional Web Applications (WAs) to Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). In this context, Model Driven (MD) Web Engineering approaches have been extended with new modeling primitives to obtain the benefits provided by RIA features. However, during the last decade, widespread language-specific Web frameworks have supported actual Web system development. In this paper we present a MD modernization process to obtain RIAs from legacy WAs based on such frameworks. MD techniques reduce complexity and improve reusability of the process. Being navigational information of upmost importance for the modernization process of a Web application, the paper is focused on presenting the metamodel defined to extract navigational information from the legacy system, the models obtained and the projection of these models to a particular MD Web Engineering methodology.

Generating a Conceptual Representation of a Legacy Web Application

Web application (WA) development has been fueled by the definition and evolution of web application frameworks since late 90’s. In parallel, Model Driven Web Engineering approaches have been defined and successfully applied to reduce the effort of web application development and reuse, fostering the independence of the implementation technology. Although they pursue similar objectives, both approaches have lived and evolved separately. The work presented herein tries to reduce the gap between them by defining a model-driven reverse engineering process to generate a conceptual representation from a framework-based legacy web application. This work is part of a bigger project, named MIGRARIA, whose main goal is to define a model-driven modernization process to obtain Rich Internet Aplications (RIAs) from legacy web systems.