Building multi-device, content-centric applications using WebML and the W3I3 tool suite

In the forthcoming years, two factors will jeopardize the deployment of Web applications: supporting multi-device outputs and one-to-one personalization. These two factors will lead to an explosion of solutions, to be developed, maintained, and kept consistent; meanwhile, Web hosting companies will be subject to growing service demands and will be lacking the technical man-power required to master them, With these premises, the strength of the W3I3(1) tool suite is to propose a model-driven approach to Web site design. Such an approach is based on WebML, a high-level language for specifying the structure of the content of a Web application and the organization and presentation of such a content in a Web site. In this paper, after a brief presentation of WebML, we concentrate on the W3I3 tool architecture, shown at work on case-study based on the popular site http://www.softseek.com