Commercial Tools for the Development of Personalized Web Applications: A Survey

In this paper we examine the state-of-the-practice of development tools for delivering personalized Web sites, i.e Web-oriented applications that collect, elaborate and use information about the site’s users to better fulfill their mission. Personalization is at the same time one of the crucial success factors of B2C applications and one of the most significant cost factors in Web application development. In this paper, we classify the dimensions of personalized Web site development, review and classify 50 tools claiming to support such development, and motivate our conclusions on the need of a different approach to the personalization design and a novel generation of personalization tools.