Model-based version and configuration management for a web engineering lifecycle

ABSTRACT

During a lifecycle of a large-scale Web application, Web developers produce a wide variety of inter-related Web objects. Following good Web engineering practice, developers often create them based on a Web application development method, which requires certain logical models for the development and maintenance process. Web development is dynamic, thus, those logical models as well as Web artifacts evolve over time. However, the task of managing their evolution is still very inefficient because design decisions in models are not directly accessible in existing file-based software configuration management repositories. Key limitations of existing Web version control tools include their inadequacy in representing semantics of design models and inability to manage the evolution of model-based objects and their logical connections to Web documents. This paper presents a framework that allows developers to manage versions and configurations of models and to capture changes to model-to-model relations among Web objects. Model-based objects, Web documents, and relations are directly represented and versioned in a structure-oriented manner.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.9 Management

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.4 Hypertext/Hypermedia

General Terms:
Documentation, Management

Keywords:
model-based configuration management, versioned hypermedia, web engineering