An MDA Approach to Develop Web Components

Model-Driven Development (MDD) supports the automating of code generation by performing a set of transfomations between models. This approach is currently been applied to specific domains and in particular in the web domain, and this is because web aplications have evolved with the appearance of AJAX and Web 2.0 technology, and a new breed of applications for the Internet has emerged. However, as web applications become more and more complex, the performance degree is negatively affected, since the initial stages of software life cycle are not incorporated into the development process of this type of applications. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes a model-driven architecture to support web application development from the design to the implementation model. With this objective, the following tasks have been performed: first a new profile extends UML with new concepts from the web domain, next a new framework supports web application development by composing web components, and finally, a transformation model generates web applications from the UML extension proposed. The main contributions of this work is a cost and complexity reduction of web applications, and a high reusability degree achieved, since web components can be reused in different web applications.