A Model-driven Approach for Empowering Advance Web Augmentation From Client-side to Server-side Support

Abstract

Websites augmentations have been adopted as a mean for improving the User Experience of applications that often are not owned by the user. The augmentations alter the page in order to add, modify and even remove its content pursuing the satisfaction of a user’s need. However, these augmentations are limited to page modification or transcluding content from another site on Internet. Moreover, advance server-side based augmentations have been released only by developers because of the required technical skill for the task. In this work, we have presented a novel approach for designing Web Augmentation coping client-side and server side using a Model-Driven Web Engineering approach. The approach rises the abstraction level for server side developments allowing end-users to design, and even implement the new functionalities. Additionally, the approach uses advance separation of concern principles thus we provide a set of tools for designing the composition of the core application and the augmentation. We show as running example an augmentation that introduces a site community’s review support upon an agriculture e-commerce site.