Engineering flexible World Wide Web services
Markus W. Schranz · 1998
World Wide Web service and application engineering is a complex task, comparable to the software engineering process.Similar to CASE environments in software engineering, web service editors and web document designers are successful products on the market.Most of the tools concentrate on single web page creation; only a few manage the organization of complete web services.Large web applications containing hundreds or thousands of documents and complex interactive services need a more sophisticated engineering approach.Basic requirements for a web application management system are proper organizations of both the data and the navigation model.Consistent interface design and integration facilities for static information and dynamic interactive services identify a good engineering toolset.A real challenge to the engineering task is the introduction of flexibility to the web applications in terms of content changes, layout design updates, temporal information changes, multilinguai support and online content management.We discuss the benefits of databases to keep the web service information and the use of the HTML++ toolset to map the database contents to World Wide Web documents.Databases are used to introduce an abstract level of data management for web applications.The object-based HTML++ toolset is used to engineer complex web applications like the Vienna International Festival WWW presence.This case study contains 300+ multilingual pages and several interactive services.The combination of database support and HTML++ introduces a high level of flexibility to the festival's web service engineering.1.I N T R O D U C T I O N Since the development of the lntemet.Ihe World Wide Web is the most popular application using ~his global