Model-driven web applications

With the evolution of web 2.0 and the appearance of AJAX technology a new breed of applications for the Web has emerged. However, the low reusability degree achieved and high development costs are the main problems identified in this domain. Another important issue that must be taken into consideration is that the performance degree of this type of applications is drastically affected by latency, since they must be downloaded before they can be used. Therefore, it becomes essential to boost a software development approach to attenuate these problems. This is the reason why this paper proposes a model-driven architecture for developing web applications. Towards this end, the following tasks have been developed: first a new profile extends UML and introduces web concepts at design level, then a new framework supports web application development according to the component-based methodology, and finally a transformation model is proposed to generate the final code semi-automatically. Another contribution of this work is the definition of a cache and a prefetching protocol to reduce latency and provide high performance web applications.