Hello!
None of those tools (Mendix,OutSystems,WebRatio) is a UML tool. Do you know any MDA approach to create data intensive and rich web applications? I only see Bluage.
Evidently, UML has nothing to create navigation diagramas between different pages or user interfaces, but perhaps some company have a profile…
Do you believe that in order to create web information systems MDA/UML is not enough (so, a DSL is required)?
Thanks for replies.
in my former company we had a tool ArcStyler (www.arcstyler.com) which was on of the first MDA tools and based on UML.
We had Codegenerator Cartridge for Web and supported really PIM models.
So you were able to generate a Microsoft IIS/ASP and a Tomcat JSP webapplication from the same UML/MDA model. (with db-access and all that suff).
Nowadays I have lots of deja vues at the moment, e.g. tools with generate applications for iphone and adroid from the same model.
I think ArcStyler was well ahead of its time and hence unfortunately not so a great success in the end. We should have build it 10 years later 😉
Berni
Please have a look at UWE (http://uwe.pst.ifi.lmu.de/). It is a very good and solid proposal, based on UML.
There is also a UML profile for Web Applications defined some time ago by Jim Conallen (WAE: http://www.amazon.ca/Building-Web-Applications-UML-Conallen/dp/0201615770). The problems with this language (in my modest opinion, of course) are the following:
a) it is very low-level,
b) It only covers some aspects of a web application, not all concerns, and
c) it only covers the design phase, i.e., it has no tool support for generating implementations in different platforms, using different technologies, etc.
There has also been a big effort in making several proposals interoperate by sharing models. There are also UML profiles for some of the most widely used Model-driven Web Engineering proposals, including WebML. Maybe it is worth having a look at the following papers (to start with:
Wieland Schwinger, et al. “A survey on web modeling approaches for ubiquitous web applications”. International Journal of Web Information Systems (IJWIS),4(3):234–305, 2008. Emerald Group Publishing Limited, doi 10.1108/17440080810901089
N. Moreno and A. Vallecillo. “Towards Interoperable Web Engineering Methods”. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) 59(7):1073-1092, May 2008
This issue has also received a lot of attention in the latest editions of the ICWE conference. Please have a look at the proceedings of this conference for the last 4-5 years for descriptions of several interesting proposals in this area.
My two cents,
Antonio Vallecillo.
The discussion comments on the WebRatio interview are also relevant to this discussion
Very useful.
Are there commercial projects that use UWE? It seems very interesting.
By the way, isn’t UML+profiles+MDD an MDA approach?
Thanks.
There are a few commercial applications developed with UWE. For example the web application of Sco.LifeScience, an intranet application at Siemens, a publication management system for the LMU. They have been developed using the UWE profile.
Any UML CASE tool can be used to develop UWE models. The MagicDraw plugin – called MagicUWE – provides additional support for modelling with UWE, which is available for downloading at http://uwe.pst.ifi.lmu.de/. A new UWE profile and plugin extending the support for modelling RIAs is coming soon.