A model-driven approach to develop high performance web applications

• A model-driven architecture is proposed to develop web applications.
• A new profile is defined in order to extend UML metamodel in the web domain.
• A new framework for developing web applications that incorporates a prefetching cache mechanism has been performed.
• It is achieved an increase in the quality degree of web applications.
• The latency, performance and reusability degree have also been increased.

The evolution of web technologies in the last few years has contributed to the improvement of web applications, and with the appearance of AJAX and Web 2.0 technology, a new breed of applications for the Internet has emerged: widgets, gadgets and mashups are some examples of this trend. However, as web applications become more and more complex, development costs are increasing in an exponential rate, and we believe that considering a software engineering methodology in the development process of this type of applications, contributes to the solution of this problem. In order to solve this question, this paper proposes a model-driven architecture to support web application development from the design to the implementation model. With this aim, the following tasks have been performed: first a new profile extends UML with new concepts extracted from the web domain, then a new framework supports web application development by composing heterogeneous web elements, and finally, a transformation model generates web applications from the UML extension proposed. The main contribution of this work is a cost and complexity reduction due to the incorporation of a model-driven architecture into the web application development process, but other advantages that can be mentioned are a high performance degree achieved by a prefetching cache mechanism, and a high reusability, since web elements can be reused in different web applications.

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