Iterative Model-Driven Development of Software Extensions for Web Content Management Systems

摘要

Dynamic web applications powered by Web Content Management Systems (WCMSs) such as Joomla, WordPress, or Drupal dominate today's web. A main advantage of WCMSs is their functional extensibility by standardized WCMS extensions. However, the development and evolution of these extensions are challenging tasks. Due to dependencies to the core platform and other WCMS extensions, the code structure of an extension includes a large defect potential. Mistakes usually lead to website crashes and are hard to find, especially for inexperienced developers. In this work, we define a model-driven development (MDD) process and apply it during the development of software extensions for the WCMS Joomla. To address two separate scenarios, involving the development of independent and dependent WCMS extensions, we use an MDD infrastructure, comprising a domain-specific language, a code editor, and reverse engineering facilities. In addition, we provide evidence indicating that our model-driven approach is useful to generate extensions with consistent interdependencies, demonstrating that the main issues of extension development in the WCMS domain can be addressed using a model-driven approach. By applying the MDD infrastructure on actual projects, we additionally present the lessons learned.