WebCon: design and modeling of database driven hypertext applications

As the Web has evolved from its origins as a simple delivery mechanism to a platform for complex applications, the connection of databases and the Web has become more and more important. The design process for a database driven hypertext application is usually divided into modeling of the database and modeling of the hypertext structure. In most of these applications information content is stored within the database, while the hypertext structure is located outside the database system in flat files. This leads to inconsistencies, labor-consuming maintenance and unsatisfying scalability. We present the WebCon approach which uses a traditional data model for storing both the application domain and the hypertext structure. A special repository is introduced for handling meta data which describes the hypertext structure of an application. We implemented a set of universal templates for creating HTML pages out of database contents based on the WebCon repository. The main benefits of WebCon are scalability, high consistency, easy maintenance and rapid prototyping.