Thesis full text PDF - Politecnico di Milano

5. MVC-WebFlow Ajax tool5.1. Objectives and contextMVC-WebFlow project deals with the development of an online editing tool to ease thespecification of MVC-WebFlow models. The main purpose of the MVC-Webflow tool is to lower thebarrier to the adoption of Web Engineering techniques in the development practices. The tool willallow to model applications with a MVC approach adapted for the Web (namely, the Model 2design framework), which is widely adopted by developers and has some valid implementationcounterparts (e.g., Jakarta Struts). This design tool will provide both solid model-driven designfeatures typical of Web Engineering and quick application evolution thanks to a Web basedinterface that does not require a rigid development process. The final aim of the tool is a basic onthe fly code generation on Model 2 reference architectures.The advantages of MVC architectures are well known. They allow the developer to design theWeb application defining three separate levels: Model, View and Controller. In complexapplications, separation of concerns is fundamental; MVC allows it by separating data andbusiness object (the Model), user interface aspects (the View), and the rules that control theexecution logics of the application (the Controller). MVC decouples business logics and dataaccess from the presentation thanks to the Controller intermediate component.In the following figure we can see all the various stages of development of Web applications.MVC-WebFlow tool acts on the Data design step, the Hypertext design step and theImplementation step.Figure 5.1 – Development process and tool interventionRequirements analysis encompasses those tasks that go into determining the needs or conditionsto meet for the Web application, taking account of the possibly conflicting requirements of thevarious stakeholders, such as beneficiaries or users. Requirements analysis is critical to thesuccess of a development project and will produce a set of requirements (requirementsspecification) to be respected.45