M3D: A tool for the model driven development of web applications

Nowadays, Web Applications (WAs) are complex software sys- tems, used by multiple users with different roles and often devel- oped to support and manage business processes. Due to the chang- ing nature of the supported processes, WAs need to be easily and quickly modified, to adapt and align them to the processes they support. In recent years, Model Driven Engineering (MDE) ap- proaches have been proposed and used to develop and evolveWAs. However, the definition of appropriate MDE approaches for the de- velopment of flexible process-centric WAs is still limited. In par- ticular, (flexible) workflow models have never been integrated with the models (e.g., presentation, information models) used in MDE approaches to develop this type of applications. In this paper, we present M3D (Model Driven Development with Declare), a tool for developingWAs that integrates three MDE metamodels used to represent the main components of aWA with the metamodel of De- clare, a declarative language to model business processes. The tool exploits and combines the declarative nature of Declare and the ad- vantages of MDE to get an efficient roundtrip engineering support to develop and evolve flexible process-centric WAs.