A Service-oriented Process to Develop Web Applications

Web applications are widely disseminated, but, traditional development methods for this type of application still require a substantial amount of new modeling and programming. Current methods do not take significant advantage of reuse techniques, such as software product lines (PL). This paper presents the WIDE-PL environment focusing on its application generation process, called Application DEvelopment based on Services - ADESE. This environment is an evolution of WIDE - Waterloo Informatics Development Environment. The WIDE-PL environment supports the generation of Web applications based on the Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) and the product line approach. Our solution encompasses a general software architecture, an application generation process, and a set of mandatory and optional services. Examples of applications from two different domains were developed using ADESE to evaluate its feasibility. The results show that the process offers several advantages including an increase in reuse and an explicit separation between the services and the business process connecting those services.