Improving the Design of Existing Web Applications

Despite several methodologies have been defined to support the disciplined development of Web applications, often such methodologies are not applied in the practice, mainly due to the short time-to-market and resource constraints. As a consequence, existing (i.e. legacy) Web applications often lack in design quality. This paper proposes a model-driven semi-automatic redesign approach to improve the design of existing Web applications. The approach analyzes the client side HTML pages of the application to recover its conceptual model according to the Ubiquitous Web Applications design methodology. The recovered model is then used as a starting point to define a new design for the application, adopting the Model-View-Controller architectural pattern and the Java Server Faces technology. A concrete example of the application of the approach to redesign a real world Web site is also described.