Using Declarative Workflow Languages to Develop Process-Centric Web Applications

Nowadays, process-centric Web Applications (WAs) are extensively used in contexts where multi-user, coordinated work is required. Recently, Model Driven Engineering (MDE) techniques have been investigated for the development of this kind of applications. However, there are still some open issues. First, a complete roundtrip engineering support is still missing. Second, the lack of a proper integration of the existing MDE methodologies with workflow modeling techniques does not allow the developers to model the components of a WA in a compact and easy way. Third, the existing MDE approaches are based on procedural languages and not on declarative languages, even if these are more suitable to describe processes characterized by high variability. To address these issues, in this paper, we adopt a conservative approach to roundtrip engineering for the development of process-centric WAs and propose the integration of three MDE metamodels used to represent the main components of a WA with the metamodel of Declare, a declarative language to represent business processes. The proposed approach has been used to develop an online system for visit reservation in a hospital in order to validate its feasibility, correctness and effectiveness.