Recently a growing demand has arisen for methods for the development of small- and medium scale Web Information Systems (WIS). Web applications are being built in a rapidly changing environment where requirements are usually unstable. Short-time design and implementation are needed in response to the new technologies. Our work focuses rather on the design and construction of Web applications, than management. Flexibility is a major requirement in such applications, and also in a database-backed environment for the structure and presentation of the sites. We propose a systematic design method for Web applications which takes into account the data-oriented aspects of the application. The method is based on a UML profile adapted to the problem domain by means of stereotypes as well as a strategy for generating code templates from such models. We provide a method to derive the navigation model from the structural model of a Web application. We will also show guidelines for the development of the Data Layer of data-oriented Web application. Moreover, why to divide the business logic layer into two parts: the pure application logic for managing the workflow of the application and the storage logic responsible for the data structures. Rapid development is enabled by providing roundtrip engineering capabilities with support for automatic code generation. We will show the role of XML: why to use XML to support both the reuse of content and context-dependent delivery. An advantage of the proposed methodology is that several steps can be performed is a semi-automatic way providing rapid development and prototyping.

data models, MVC design pattern, UML, Web application, Web modeling techniques, XMI, XML, XSLT