In this paper we describe our work on the formulation of a document-oriented paradigm for improving the construction and maintenance of content-intensive applications (i.e. applications that make intensive use of the information provided by the experts in a given domain: the contents). According to this paradigm, the development of a content-intensive application must be the result of close collaboration between two kinds of actors: domain experts and developers. The goal of this collaboration is the authoring of (i) a set of documents describing the most relevant aspects of the application (i.e. the contents and other relevant customizable features); (ii) a grammar describing a domain-specific markup language that will be used to make the structure and the data in these documents explicit; and (iii) a suitable processor for this language. The final running application will be automatically produced by processing the marked documents with this processor. The use of this paradigm in the development of content-intensive applications can increase the initial cost of application production, but in the long run it can substantially improve maintenance and portability, and promote information and software reuse as well. We have successfully applied this paradigm to the development of educational and hypermedia applications, and knowledge-based systems. From these experiences, we have found that the feasibility of the paradigm depends to a great extent on having mechanisms that enable the incremental definition of the markup languages and the incremental construction of their processors. This has led us to the formulation of a documentoriented approach for the development of content-intensive applications tightly coupled with these principles of incremental formulation and operationalization of domain-specific markup languages.

SUMMARY The design, development and maintenance of large virtual campuses are complex issues. This paper describes the architecture of a large university multiplatform virtual campus. Because we have not found virtual campus architectures described in the literature, the goal of this paper is to make our experience available to a wider audience so that organizations interested in the deployment of a large virtual campus can take advantage of our work. Thus, this paper analyzes this architecture from three different points of view: (i) software architecture; (ii) detailed software design; and (iii) hardware architecture. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Latest-generation hypermedia applications represent a new challenge in traditional design and development software engineering techniques. Although there is an impressive array of models to design hypertext applications, these models may not be specially suited for conceptualization-prototyping stages. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive software engineering approach for dealing with the conceptualization, prototyping, and process of hypermedia applications. This approach uses the Pipe Model to characterize hypermedia applications during the conceptualization stage, while prototyping is accomplished using XML and Java technologies. An XML-based representation of the Pipe structures is the input for a Java application that automatically builds the prototypes of the hypermedia application. This XML representation may reference to Subordinate Processes, i.e. compiled Java classes that implement a predefined interface and can be executed in the hypermedia application without interacting with the navigation. We also present the Plumbing and PlumbingXJ process models, two specializations of a well-known hypermedia process model, which integrate and manage the use of the Pipe model and its associated XML and Java technologies.