A Methodology and Tool Support for Widget-Based Web Application Development

Due to the rapid evolution of Web technologies and standards like WebRTC for the real-time Web, there is a reengineering pressure on many existing Web applications for not getting outdated and for reducing costs and maintainance efforts. In this paper, we propose a methodology designed to support developers through an application reengineering process for achieving modular and scalable Web applications, by bridging the old and the new: a RESTful microservice architecture with a presentation layer composed from widgets. The methodology is based on empirical studies conducted with the help of the widget developer community and proposes an agile development cycle and guidelines for the redesign activities. Based on its principles, we developed a tool that has been used in the methodology evaluation for modeling the widget-based Web applications. The obtained results show that the approach and the proposed architecture are suitable for enabling the future generation of widget-based applications.