A survey of web information systems

1999

The recent diffusion of WWW technology and the widespread need of producing high quality WWW applications in a cost-effective manner have made important to improve the quality and the efficiency of the engineering process for WWW sites. In this paper we argue that the first ingredient needed for a well-organized process is a design model, able to describe the structural and navigational properties of WWW applications. The second ingredient is a suitable set of tools supporting the design and the development of the applications. Assuming HDM as design model, we present JWeb, a suite of tools supporting several activities: initial conceptual design, development of supporting database to store data, insertion of data, customization of design for specific applications, prototyping of applications etc.

The popularity of the World Wide Web has been increasing ever since its birth in the early 1990's. It rapidly became an important medium for content providers to publish documents for the masses. In the beginning, the content was delivered in the form of static pages but more interactive applications were soon to follow. The birth of e-commerce and other online services created a demand for better and more feature rich applications. However, web standards were not able to meet these requirements in a timely fashion which led to a situation where browser makers and web developers were forced to partially disregard to the standards to fulfill the market demand.

Web-based applications play a major role in the development and deployment of online services. Due to their unique medium of operation, they also have unique requirements when it comes to data storage. Most web applications use databases as their primary data storage mechanism, which does not only provide well-developed routines for data management, but also can be accessed via common interfaces such as Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding Database (OLEDB) and Sun's JAVA Database Connectivity (JDBC). Scalability poses a significant challenge for today's web applications, mainly due to the large population of potential users. As a result, we attempt to present a scalable architectural model that could be adopted by web application developers in order to implement scalable systems with good quality of service. This will ensure that required information is available during critical times irrespective of sudden load increase.

2001

The expanding role of the Web as a content and applications deployment platform and the appearance of new computing paradigms, such as thin-client computing, require now more than ever the introduction of concrete development frameworks. Although new approaches, technologies, tools, commercial applications appear daily, limited guidelines or frameworks exist that can assist Web developers in selecting the proper methodology and tools for the design, implementation and maintenance of flexible Web content and applications. Our work, triggered from our experience in implementing the Web presence of several large Greek Governmental organisations, attempts to address the major current and forthcoming problems that Web developers face. We propose a framework (RDF/XML based) that will act as a malleable development support environment, incorporating specific guidelines, which Web developers should always consider. The primary goals are achieving scalability (modular, component-based architecture), re-usability and technology independency in Web development. We focus on hypermedia content and applications.

A web application is one that is invoked due to a web browser over internet. In just a decade, the web has grown from a repository of static web pages to a powerful platform of choice for developing dynamic applications using large number of web technologies and languages. This survey covers five web technologies from different phases of internet development showing their features for web development.

2007

Abstract. Web services are one of the most popular ways for building distributed Web Information Systems (WIS). In this paper we propose a distributed implementation of the Hera methodology, a methodology based on models that specify the different aspects of a WIS. The Web services used in the implementation are responsible for capturing the required data transformations built around specific Hera models.

As Web-based systems play increasingly important roles in a number of applications, the demands placed on these systems and their complexity have also increased significantly. Also, there is growing need for improved quality, performance and availability of Web-based systems as we are now more dependent on Web-based systems than ever before. But, most Web-based systems are poorly developed in ad hoc manner and hence they exhibit poor performance and are susceptible for major failures. Web-based system development, in most cases, lacks rigour, systematic approach to design, disciplined development process and quality control and assurance procedures. Hence, there is growing concern about the performance, quality, integrity, maintainability and scalability of complex Web-based systems.

2006

Business processes are playing a very important role in companies and the explicit introduction of them in Information System architecture is a must. According to the interest shown towards Web Application it is important to introduce a new web-oriented class of software, which is able to gives to the manager the possibility to operating directly with the process (we will talk about process oriented WIS Web Information System). It is necessary to replace the three-level logic of the traditional application development (Data, Business Logic, Presentation), that hides processes in the Business Logic, with a fourlevel logic that allows to separate the process level from the application level: definition and management of the processes will be not tied solely to business logic. Our research (work in progress) focus is on an innovative framework (software architecture and methodology) for Information System development that links together the know-how acquired in Web Application design a...

The World Wide Web (also referred to as WWW or simply Web) was created as a means to publish documents and make them available to people in many different geographical locations. However, the advent of the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), in 1993, allowed for authors to publish software instead of documents and for visitors to execute them, producing dynamic results. The evolution of Web development technology and the emergence of high-level languages (such as PHP, ASP, JSP, etc.) and platforms (such as Microsoft .NET and Java Enterprise Edition) allowed for more complex applications to be built on the Web. Soon enough, a handful of large B2C (business-to-consumer, such as online stores) and B2B (business-to-business, such as supply chain management systems) applications were being deployed on the Internet. Thus, the concept of Web Applications (WebApps) was born. WebApps consist of a set of Web pages or components that interact with the visitor, providing, storing and processing information. WebApps can be informational, interactive, transactional, workflow-based, collaborative work environments, online communities, marketplaces or web portals (Ginige & Murugesan, 2001). In this chapter, however, we focus on a specific class of Web Applications, called Web-based Information Systems (WISs). WISs are just like traditional information systems, although deployed over the Internet or on an Intranet. These systems are usually data-centric and more focused on functionality rather than content and presentation. Examples are online stores, cooperative environments, and enterprise management systems, among many others.