Web Engineering for Cloud Computing

Web Engineering has always been concerned with modelling the

functional

aspects of Web applications.

Non-functional

(e.g., performance, availability) properties of Web applications have traditionally been a minor concern in the Web engineering community and have been seen as technology- or system-related issues. The advent of Cloud computing, with substantial delegation of “system concerns” to infrastructure or platform providers, seems at a first sight to confirm the validity of this choice. But is this really true?

We will argue that, in order to be able to actually profit from the Cloud computing paradigm, Web Engineering methodologies need several interventions transcending the platform-specific concerns of adapting to Cloud technologies.

In this position paper, we call for a long-due revamp of Web engineering methodologies to become more

sound engineering practices

with respect to both functional and non-functional aspects of Web applications. To this end, we propose a methodological framework that preserves the advantages of model-driven development, but also takes into account performance and cost considerations for Cloud-based applications.