Modeling Ubiquitous Web Applications - A Comparison of Approaches

E-commerce and m-commerce demand for full-fledged, increasingly complex applications which need to offer ubiquitous access in terms of the anytime/anywhere/anymedia paradigma. From a software engineering point of view, the development of such ubiquitous web applications requires proper modeling methods in order to ensure architectural soundness and maintainability. Recently, web modeling methods started recognizing this fact by providing first concepts for dealing with ubiquity. In this paper, two of these modeling methods are compared, identifying their strengths and shortcomings. As a prerequisite, an evaluation framework is introduced, using the notion of customization as the uniform mechanism to enable ubiquity. Customization adapts a web application towards a particular context which reflects the environment the application is running in. To enable a holistic view on the development process of a ubiquitous web application, customization is regarded as a new modeling dimension, influencing all other tasks of ubiquitous web application development.