Generating Web-Based Systems from Specifications ABSTRACT

The amount of web-based systems is growing rapidly and the complexity of the developed systems is increasing as well, and in the literature one speaks about a web crises. Many web-based systems have a structure where users via a browser can perform operations on a database. We show that major parts of the software of such applications can be generated and verified from specifications of the functional requirements and specifications of the navigation. In particular, we show how to generate a modular software architecture, which is type safe in the sense that it enforces that functions throughout the application are applied to arguments of the correct type, and navigation safe taking e.g. into account consistency among user groups, functions and reachable web pages, and type consistency of web pages wrt. to functions on links. A default implementation of the functional requirements is generated allowing e.g. the navigation to be validated at an early stage of the development. A full implementation is obtained from the generated software architecture by implementing the functional requirements only, and this is done using a strongly-typed language