Automated development of constraint-driven web applications

Today's Web Applications (WAs) are complex multi-user and multi-tenant software systems, used by users with different roles and often developed to support and manage complex business processes. Due to the changing nature of such processes, WAs need to be easily and quickly modified, to be adapted and aligned to the processes they support. In recent years, Model Driven Engineering (MDE) approaches have been used to support the development and the evolution of WAs. However, the definition of appropriate MDE approaches for the development of flexible process-centric WAs is still limited. In particular, flexible workflow models have never been integrated with the models used in MDE approaches to develop this type of applications. This paper proposes an MDE approach for the development and the evolution of flexible process-centric WAs that integrates four MDE metamodels used to represent the main components of a WA with the metamodel of Declare, a declarative language to model business processes. A case study, carried out to validate the feasibility, the correctness and the effectiveness of the proposed approach is presented and discussed.