A. Schauerhuber, M. Wimmer, W. Schwinger, E. Kapsammer, W. Retschitzegger: Aspect-Oriented Modeling of Ubiquitous Web Applications: The aspectWebML Approach, in: Engineering of Computer-Based Systems, 2007. ECBS '07. 14th Annual IEEE Proceedings of the 14th Annual IEEE International Conference and Workshops on the Engineering of Computer-Based Systems, (Hrsg.): John Leaney, Jerzy W. Rozenblit, and Jianfeng Peng, IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 2007, ISBN: 0-7695-2772-8, pages 569 - 576. pdf
Ubiquitous web applications (UWA) are required to be customizable, meaning their services need to be adaptable towards the context of use, e.g., user, location, time, and device. Considering UWA’s from a software engineering point of view, a systematic development on basis of models is crucial. Current web modeling languages, however, often disregard the crosscutting nature of customization potentially affecting all parts of a web application, and often mingle core and customization functionality. This leads to inefficient development processes, high maintenance overheads, and a low potential for reuse. We regard customization as a crosscutting concern in the sense of the aspect-oriented paradigm. As a proof of concept, we extend the prominent web modeling language WebML on basis of our reference architecture for aspect-oriented modeling. This allows for a clear separation between the core and customization functionality, and — as a spin-off — demonstrates how to bridge existing (domain-specific) modeling languages with aspect-oriented concepts.