The understanding of Web application development mostly neglects approaches to Hypermedia concepts and manageable structures of the information space, resulting in Web sites that fail in achieving typical goals that are important for evolving applications. The implementation model of the Web burdens the application of design methodologies like object-orientation due to the document-centric granularity. To overcome this gap a disciplined engineering approach is necessary. In this paper we present a dedicated process model, which enables a software-engineer to map an object-oriented design to the Web implementation model using a component-based implementation technology and a supporting framework.

An essential part of modern enterprise software development is metadata. Mainstream metadata formats, including XML deployment descriptors and Java 5 annotations, suffer from a number of limitations that complicate the development and maintenance of enterprise applications. Their key problem is that they make it impossible to reuse metadata specifications not only across different applications but even across smaller program constructs such as classes or methods. To provide better enterprise metadata, we present patternbased structural expressions (PBSE), a novel metadata representation that offers conciseness and maintainability advantages and is reusable. To apply PBSE to enterprise applications, we translate PBSE specifications to Java annotations, with annotating classes automatically as an intermediate build step. We demonstrate the advantages of the new metadata format by assessing its conciseness and reusability, as compared to XML and annotations, in the task of expressing metadata of J2EE reference applications and a mid-size, commercial, enterprise application.