Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

In the period between 1995 and 1998, websites were almost entirely composed of static html files. They were 100% interfaces but in 1998 the percentage decreased to 90% and in year 2002 they constituted less than 50% of those available on the Internet. This percentage and the complexity of the web applications are inversely proportional. Interfaces websites are in continuous decrease and the complexity of web applications is in a continuous increase. Nowadays, web applications are powered by distributed software implemented using a myriad of languages like HTML, XML, JavaScript, etc. This heterogeneity encouraged the researchers who have had a certain experience with software engineering to explore the WWW and thus they proposed a new approach called Web Engineering. Web engineering is not a perfect clone of software engineering but it borrows many of its fundamental concepts and principles emphasizing the same management and technical activities. Its work products lead to analysis models, design models and test procedures. Within this context many efforts have been addressed towards defining design models for web applications to implement reusable and well structured web applications. The newly proposed approach is the fruit of such efforts. For instance, the FBM-HWA approach falls within the basket of design models.  It is not purely based on an object oriented concept and does not refer to UML for notation purposes , as it is the case in most existing approaches. It models the behavior of web applications using Finite State Machines (FSMs) and simplifies the task of developers and testers at once by providing them with a total overview of the application.  We believe that by modeling web applications with FSMs, it becomes possible to create models that present deterministic responses for unanticipated actions in almost any condition or situation.