MDWA : uma abordagem guiada por modelos para desenvolvimento de software Web

Abstract

Software development techniques continually evolve in order to improve development and maintenance processes in addition to lower costs and higher quality. The goal of MDD is to reduce the semantic distance between a problem and its solution specification. Therefore MDD focuses on high-level abstraction modeling and successive model transformations, until finally, generate code. Studies assert that model-driven development can be significantly more efficient than traditional source code-driven software development and still reduce the possibility of occurrence of several problems during the software life-cycle. Likewise, Web engineering can also be benefited by MDD adoption, especially when supported by approaches that facilitate MDD use. Web development is usually agile with frequent releases, these approaches must be flexible to adapt to this context. However, generally, the approaches proposed by the academic community have complex processes which involve many different model definitions, programming languages, plug-ins and IDEs. These features contradict the practices adopted by Web developers. This paper presents the MWDA (Model-Driven Web Applications) approach that provides a simple process to support model-driven web development. This approach does not depend on tools, technologies or plug-ins and encourage combination with other forms of reuse and development processes. Furthermore, the Ruby- MDWA was developed with Ruby language and Ruby on Rails framework support, in order to create Web applications with MDWA assistance. This tool provides a set of textual models and defines M2M and M2C transformation tools, maintaining the requirements traceability since its specification to its construction and further maintenance. In order to show the use of the approach and tool, it was performed a real study case with a software company, from São Carlos SP, where a project management system was developed. In parallel, two experiments were conducted with undergraduate students in Computer Science and Computer Engineering and a Masters in Computer Science, to evaluate the gains and limitations of the Ruby-MDWA tool.