Web Engineering

The research project Web-based Federation Technologies for Science (codename "Hanoi") is concerned with the practical application of federated Web technology in real-life scenarios. This covers e.g. single-sign on access across Web sites, inter-organizational use of Web services, or federation management with the help of architecture registries.

The project is concerned with methods and infrastructure systems to support the handling of Web portal components. A main focus lies on the secure execution of foreign (potentially harmful) code as well as the portal-spanning exchange of components with Web-service based technologies.

The WebComposition Markup Language (WCML) project was started in 1997 and provided the first basis for the WebComposition research focus. WCML describes an XML vocabulary for the WebComposition approach that allows definition of (Web-) components, properties, and relationships between these components. The WCML provides a generic mechanism facilitating compositional reuse. Distributed Components (nested in Virtual Component Stores) can be used to design and implement a Web-Application. The components may e.g. model high-level design concepts, like design pattern or OOHDM classes.

Web application development suffers increasingly from the coarse-grained implementation model of the Web, as established software design concepts are hardly applicable to it. The object-oriented WebComposition Markup Language (WCML) addresses these problems with a fine-grained component-based model and thus supports the application of software engineering practice to applications in the Web. In this project, we introduce the WebComposition Repository as a key tool for a systematic approach to code reuse. The repository is used for storing, managing, and retrieving large numbers of WCML components. Consequently, it facilitates reuse in component-based Web Engineering.