CMS-Based Web-Application Development Using Model-Driven Languages

Content management systems (CMS) are typically regarded as critical software platforms for the success of organizational web sites and intranets. Although most current CMS systems allow their extension through the addition of modules/components, these are usually built using the typical source-code-oriented software development process, which is slow and error-prone. On the other hand, a MDE-oriented development process is centered on models, which represent the system and are used to automatically generate all corresponding artifacts, such as source-code and documentation. This paper describes our proposal for a MDE approach to address the development of web-applications based on CMS systems. This approach is based on the creation of two CMS-oriented languages (situated at different levels of abstraction, and are used to both quickly model a web-application and provide a common ground for the creation of additional CMS-oriented languages), and a mechanism for the processing of models specified using those languages. Those models are then to be deployed to a target CMS platform by means of code generation or model interpretation/execution mechanisms.