Using Lightweight Activity Diagrams for Modeling and Generation of Web Information Systems

TL;DR

This paper presents a model-driven, lightweight approach using activity diagrams within MontiWIS to efficiently model and generate web information systems, reducing redundant development steps.

Contribution

It introduces a novel use of activity diagrams for modeling web system workflows and automates system generation, streamlining the development process.

Findings

Effective modeling of page and workflow aspects using activity diagrams

Automated generation of complete web applications from models

Support for agile and lightweight development process

Abstract

The development process of web information systems nowadays improved a lot regarding effectiveness and tool support, but still contains many redundant steps for similar tasks. In order to overcome this, we use a model-driven approach to specify a web information system in an agile way and generate a full- edged and runnable application from a set of models. The covered aspects of the system comprise data structure, page structure including view on data, page- and workflow within the system as well as overall application structure and user rights management. Appropriate tooling allows transforming these models to complete systems and thus gives us opportunity for a lightweight development process based on models. In this paper, we describe how we approach the page- and workflow aspect by using activity diagrams as part of the agile modeling approach MontiWIS. We give an overview of the defined syntax, describe the supported forms of action contents and finally explain how the behavior is realized in the generated application.