JESSICA: an object-oriented hypermedia publishing processor

The lifecycle of Web applications covers the design, implementation, and maintenance of the services. First generation Web development tools just concentrated on the creation of single pages. Later Web engineering tools have been integrating the management of complete Web sites and the navigation model. But only few attempt to cover all the aspects of the lifecycle, and especially the maintenance task which is essential on a dynamic medium as is the case on the Web. To increase the manageability and introduce flexibility to large Web services we introduce the JESSICA engineering system that employs an object-oriented abstraction model for the hypermedia information. An object-oriented language describes components of the Web service that are easy to manage, reusable, highly dynamic and of polymorphic type, covering all elements of a complete Web site. The objects are accessible throughout the lifecycle for management and maintenance activities. A compiler maps the abstract service description to the file-based repository of a standard Web server. We demonstrate the feasibility of the engineering system on managing the Vienna International Festival Web site, a multilingual database Web application on culture and arts, containing 300+ static pages and several interactive services. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.