Experiences with a Dialog-Driven Process Model for Web Application Development

Abstract

We present a dialog-driven process model for the development of web-based applications that uses a graphical notation to model and iteratively refine the application's dialog flow, and communicate with non-technical stakeholders in the development process. This way, the user interface can drive the design and implementation of the application logic and data model instead of being dictated by it. After an introduction of the underlying notation and dialog control framework, we present how these tools can support the phases of the development process and discuss experiences gained from the implementation of a web application that was built using this approach.

Efficient Modeling of Hierarchical Dialog Flows for Multi-ChannelWeb Applications

“…Our prototypic implementation of the travel portal ARGuS, a complex web application, already yielded encouraging results regarding the savings in implementation effort that seem possible using this approach [4]. In our ongoing research, we are striving to gain more insight into the impact that the DFN and DCF have on the development effort of web-based applications.…”

“…As an example for a concrete implementation of these formal specifications, we present the architecture of the DCF in Sect. 4. After an overview of the related work (Sect.…”

Executable Semantics of Recursively Nestable Dialog Flow Specifications for Web Applications

“…However, these semantics are not easily accessible to other tool developers, who thus cannot be completely sure that particular language constructs express exactly what they mean, or that framework implementations for other platforms work exactly as they intended. This has become especially apparent in our recent development of tools [3], applications [5] and extensions [6] based on the notation. The integration of tools for creating, validating and executing DFN speci cations, and the parallel existence of several implementations of the framework, make precisely de ned and well-understood semantics indispensable.…”