Nowadays, Web applications are almost omnipresent. The Web has become a
platform not only for information delivery, but also for eCommerce
systems, social networks, mobile services, and distributed learning
environments. Engineering Web applications involves many intrinsic
challenges due to their distributed nature, content orientation, and the
requirement to make them available to a wide spectrum of users who are
unknown in advance. The authors discuss these challenges in the context
of well-established engineering processes, covering the whole product
lifecycle from requirements engineering through design and
implementation to deployment and maintenance. They stress the importance
of models in Web application development, and they compare well-known
Web-specific development processes like WebML, WSDM and OOHDM to
traditional software development approaches like the waterfall model and
the spiral model. Important problem areas inherent to the Web, like
localization, personalization, accessibility, and usage analysis, are
dealt with in detail, and a final chapter provides both a description of
and an outlook on recent Semantic Web and Web 2.0 developments. Overall,
their book delivers a comprehensive presentation of the state-of-the-art
in Web application development and thus forms an ideal basis for
academic or industrial courses in this or related areas. It is equally
suitable for self-study by researchers or advanced professionals who
require an overview on how to use up-to-date Web technologies.
