WISBuilder: A Framework for Facilitating Development of Web-Based Information Systems

This paper presents WISBuilder, a framework that investigates an approach for facilitating the development of Web-based Information Systems. The approach is based on the Model-View-Controller and Generative Programming paradigms. Firstly, the WISBuilder framework applies the following separation of tasks: structure, business-logic and visual style. The system specification is performed with two high-level XML-based languages: WSML and WAML. Secondly, WISBuilder proposes the creation of reusable code templates for each high-level language. Thirdly, WISBuilder uses predefined code templates for expanding the system specification in high-level annotations. The goals of this framework are twofold: to speed-up development by writing less code and development in parallel; and to promote software reusability by reusing generic code templates. Experimental results with three small-scale Webbased information systems show an important reduction of programming effort, using the proposed framework in comparison with an equivalent manual coding. These results show initial evidence that software development based on both paradigms is a good practice.