Thesis full text PDF - Politecnico di Milano

6. Conclusions and future developmentIn this project we have proposed a light-weight design methodology that leads to thedevelopment of MVC applications. With this project project we have presented an on-line visualediting tool called MVC-Webflow for the specification of simple conceptual models for MVCapplications and we provide partial automatic code generation, that can be performed on theflight directly on the deployed application.The tool is based on a visual model for easily describing the controller behaviour and the usedaction classes. To achieve this goal we have developed a metamodel defined by a set ofprimitives and by the rules for specifying the connections among those primitives. The diagramresulting from the design phase represents the conceptual schema of the MVC application. Withthis model and using the tool the developer is able to define the data structure and the flow ofthe application, the view composed by the JSP pages and the controller which process the userrequests and acts as intermediary between the business logic and the view.Our project has allowed us to try a new approach to support the developer during the design ofWeb applications. The advantages of the approach are the closeness to the well known MVCparadigm, the foundation on solid web engineering models, and the reduction of the duration ofdevelopment cycle.The tool is still under development and the future works will deal with this two main aspects:The implementation of the data view of the graphic tool which will allow to model the datastructure of the application;For the moment the generation is partial, the tool generates the basilar structure of theapplication and allow the user to download it. The application structure is composed oftwo directory, one with the web application files (configuration files, JSP pages, ...) andthe other with all the necessary Jakarta Struts files (to put in the parent folder of theapplication directory). The generation logic will have to be completed and refined, thegoal will be to compile the generated file and run the application on the flyDemo for The Eighth International Conference on Web EngineeringThe Eighth International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE2008) will be held in July 2008 inYorktown Heights, New York, USA. ICWE2008 aims at promoting research and scientificexcellence on Web Engineering and at bringing together practitioners, scientists, and researchersinterested in technologies, methodologies, tools, and techniques used to develop and maintainWeb-based applications, leading to better applications and systems, and thus to enabling andimproving the dissemination and use of content and services through the Web.69