Building E-commerce applications from object-oriented conceptual models

Abstract

This paper introduces an extension to UML that takes care of web page navigation using the OO-Method, dynamic prototyping, and a new way of specifying the navigation design. Furthermore, a software production process for e-commerce applications design is described. This process is driven by an Object-Oriented Web-Solutions Modeling approach (OOWS), which provides mechanisms to deal with the development of web-based applications. In the proposed process, a system is completely specified using object-oriented conceptual modeling techniques to capture properly the specific functionality of an e-commerce application. We place special emphasis on a navigational model that provides abstraction primitives to capture and represent navigational semantics. With such an extended conceptual model, system functionality and navigational features are described within a unified framework. Once the system specification is completed (problem space level), a strategy to obtain the software components that will constitute the final software product (solution space level) is defined. We briefly discuss how to map these abstraction primitives to e-commerce applications in order to be able to go from the problem space to the solution space in a structured, automated way.