Meta-modeling Techniques Meet Web Application Design Tools

Web-based hypermedia systems are becoming more and more sophisticated, new modeling requirements constantly arise, and design models must constantly evolve. Since design tools should complement models to support an efficient design process, model evolution raises a technological issue: Design tools must be modified when their underlying model changes. This is why the paper proposes a general approach to efficiently update design tools in response to model evolutions. The key ideas are: a) the description of a hypermedia model in terms of a general meta-model, powerful enough to express the semantics of current and future design constructs; b) the transformation of a hypermedia design tool into a meta-CASE tool, able to cope with model updates without requiring to be redefined and rebuilt from scratch. The approach is presented by discussing a case study, that is, the feasibility study to transform our design toolkit, Jweb, into a meta-CASE tool (Jweb3). This tool will support the latest version of our model (called W2000), and will easily evolve with the model it supports. We discuss the adoption of the OMG meta-modeling standards MOF and XMI as enabling technology, we present a sample of the representation of W2000 in terms of MOF, and we sketch the architecture of the under-implementation Jweb3.