Educating students and computer science professionals in Web Engineering skills is an increasingly important topic. However, due to the infancy of Web Engineering as a discipline, it is a challenge to provide appropriate learning materials. In this paper we analyze textbooks dealing with Web Engineering. We introduce a scheme for comparison and provide a qualitative assessment of 11 textbooks issued over the last 13 years.
Web Engineering (WE) is both a subject of research as well as a set of skills that computer science professionals increasingly need to understand. But even though there is a plethora of resources available (text books, individual chapters, and also online resources – google.com for instance lists 352.000 entries on the term “Web Engineering”, yahoo.com even offers 5,670.000 hits1), it is difficult to find appropriate course material. We believe there are several reasons for that: firstly, Web Engineering as a discipline is not yet as mature as e.g. software engineering; secondly, given the speed of change and hype in Web technologies, it is difficult to provide up-to-date learning materials (as books); thirdly, as is true for software engineering, the subject is complex and can only be taught in a constructivist way [1]. Finally, Web Engineering is clearly interdisciplinary and encompasses technologies, applications, business models, and process models as well as themes like Semantic Web and other domains [2]. Therefore, the following market analysis of existing textbooks on Web Engineering attempts to give an overview of the type of books that are available and discusses their appropriateness as teaching resource for courses on Web Engineering.
Given the broadness of the term “Web Engineering” we need to provide a
definition for focusing our work. We refer to the following definition [3]: “(
Mendes at al. [4] provide a systematic review of Web Engineering research by analyzing 173 research papers. In particular they focus on the research contribution and methodological soundness of research papers and conclude that only a minority of papers are methodologically sound.
Navarro [2] provides a comprehensive view of research literature available to the Web Engineering community. He analyses 700 papers in various journals from a “Software Engineering Body of Knowledge” perspective. His conclusions are that Web Engineering is still an emerging discipline, which is heterogeneous with a nonempty intersection with software engineering.
Hadjerrouit [1] addresses the issue of teaching Web Engineering from a pedagogical point of view. He argues that there are three types of skills to be taught (using a constructivist approach):
Prerequisite skills, e.g., object-oriented development and programming with UML and an object-oriented language such as Java; database development with JDBC and relational databases; Web programming with Javascript, etc.; knowledge of structured documents, in particular, XHMTL, HTML5, etc. Specific skills: this is where we believe textbooks should have their main focus; in particular, they should focus on process models, requirements engineering, design, deployment and testing; Generic skills: Project management and planning; design based on re-use principles; reading and writing skills; dialogue und communication with stakeholders In summarizing, even though there are some extensive analyses available, they all focus on research papers. Therefore, to the best of our knowledge there is no work on comparing textbooks for Web Engineering.
For our analysis, we started by collecting and comparing 11 existing textbooks on Web Engineering, which are listed with their full bibliography in Section 3.
As a next step, we split our analysis into several dimensions. The first dimension concerns the type of publication. We distinguished between course book, edited volume, introductory texts, etc. The second dimension concerns the educational setup (i.e., examples, glossary, additional literature, etc). The third dimension deals with general criteria, here we categorized visual appearance; structure and outline; comprehensibility; and appropriateness. Finally, we had a look at the contents of the books from a thematic, i.e., Web Engineering, point of view.
It should be pointed out that we did not take into account books published as conference proceedings, such as “Web Engineering: 9th International Conference, ICWE 2009 San Sebastián, Spain, June 24-26 2009“. We would also like to stress that we excluded books specifically targeted at technologies, e.g. “Building web applications with Ruby”2. 4
We start our presentation by providing a tag cloud3. Fig.1 has been generated using the table of contents available from the textbooks of this analysis. We provided up to the first three levels of the ToCs’ hierarchy, converted all terms to US-English and changed plural to singular in order to focus the themes/tags.
By looking at the tag cloud it becomes apparent that design, application, development, process, modeling and development are prominent terms. Actually, we would have thought that “architecture” would get some more importance but 2 Please note that this is only an example! 3 This tag cloud has been generated with http://wordle.net/ apparently it does not occur often enough in titles of chapters and/or sections. The “non-focus” on technologies on the other hand makes sense in that the books selected are targeted on the process and engineering aspects.
In the following, we briefly characterize the books we have chosen:
(
There is a coherent example throughout the book. (10) Mishra, J.: Web Engineering and Its Applications, Narosa Pub House, 2008, 232 pages. This is a collection of research papers, attempting to combine the aspects of modeling and implementation. There are some rather technical papers (Internet backbone infrastructure, search crawlers, etc.) which at some point seem very specific (albeit relevant). The chapters also vary quite a bit in length and style. (11) Casteleyn, S., Daniel, F., Dolog, P., Matera, M.: Engineering Web Applications, Springer 2009, 349 pages. This textbook prepends a chapter on technologies, follows the typical development process with an extension on adaptation in its core part and ends with a contribution to semantic Web and Web 2.0 issues. The authors assembled a variety of Web relevant methods, techniques and tools from the software engineering and from the Web modeling & design perspective.
The following Table 1 summarizes our analysis results wrt. the dimension “type of book”. We distinguish between “course book”, “edited volume” (i.e., books with different authors for the individual chapters), “introductory text” (whereby we mean whether concepts, techniques and methods are explained in more detail with practical examples) and “Web resource” (i.e., whether additional information is available on the Web). As can be seen from the table, only a few books are course books and most of them are edited volumes (which may be an indication of the diverse and multidisciplinary nature of WE, see also the conclusions). six parts with varying numbers of chapters, therefore partly imbalanced and somewhat serendipitous coherence of the chapters is not reflected; mixture of WE related parts and non WE related chapters; each chapter in itself follows the same thorough structure 2 chapters on project management/process, main part (7 chapters) on product development according to the development process, 3 chapters on quality aspects; future:
semantic web "Standard" research paper style of appearance; good to read, good layout; individual notations in figures main part (9 of 15 chapters) on Web Design Models; a introductory chapter and a conclusions chapter provide the necessary links overall good; however, as an edited volume it very much depends on the individual authors' contributions b/w, excellent graphics, outlines a Web Engineering process and
good use of UML, then has dedicated chapters for the excellent printing quality various activities aligned to the process; has almost a non-focus on technologies
clear language, one example scenario that is used throughout the book, question & answer type of
style for communication mixed style, multiple authors, research papers 20 chapters with varying subjects, length and style mixed, depending on author researchers researchers practitioners, also researchers Casteleyn et al. 2009 good graphics and layout preceeding chapter on technologies, 6 chapters following the development process, outlook chapter good to read, in parts mixture of sw-perspective and Web modeling perspective students, practitioners, researchers
Finally, in Table 4 we provide the results of our analysis according to themes covered.
As a basis for our analysis, we follow the classification of Pressman Software Engineering Resources4, which we extend by themes such as new issues arising from Web Science (including legal aspects or SNA) and therefore come up with the following criteria: 4 http://www.rspa.com/spi/#webe, last visited on April 20, 2010.
Web Engineering Process: characteristics of the Web, general WE information, WE process, Web authoring guides, Web metrics Formulation and Planning: project planning and formulation for Web applications Analysis Modeling for Web Applications: analysis concepts for the Web, analysis methods Design Modeling for Web Applications: general topics, design principles, design methods (e.g., OOHDM), content design, architectural design, interface design, usability design, navigation design, Web design style guides, technology issues Testing of Web Applications: general testing resources, testing/qa articles and papers, navigation and configuration testing, usability testing, security and performance testing, testing tools Web Science extensions (i.e. issues going beyond common WE tasks): legal and privacy issues, business aspects, social network analysis, Web governance, models of Web structure and Web growth etc. [16] - Specific Features and Future Developments: Semantic Web, GeoWeb, etc.
As can be seen from the table most books cover the Web engineering process and all activities of the Web application development cycle. However, in more detail, the presentations of these phases vary significantly with respect to the timeliness of its content, (e.g. the discipline’s evolution implies the risk of outdated content), the extent (i.e. most books focus on one or a few specific methods instead of providing a comprehensive overview and evaluation), and the viewpoint they approach the issue from (i.e. SW engineer perspective vs. Web modeling & design perspective). Future developments are included by more recent books as add-on, while Web Science extensions, e.g. legal or business issues are rarely discussed.
Specific Features and Future Development business concerns general outlook cost estimation Semantic Web general outlook general outlook general outlook
adaptation Semantic Web, Web 2.0/3.0 In this contribution we have provided an analysis of 11 books on Web Engineering. We have structured our work in different dimensions (type of book, didactical set-up, overall readability and themes covered) and we have given some details on the results for each of the books.
In concluding, we want to stress the following:
From a didactical point of view we agree with Hadjerrouit [1] in that the subject of Web Engineering can only be taught if a) sufficient basic knowledge is available and b) there are accompanying lectures (practical course work) that allow students to actually understand the topics by working themselves (this is referred to as constructivist approach).
Secondly, the discipline is emerging rapidly and it seems to become even broader. Web Science and/or Geoweb are but two aspects of emerging topics. We believe that these themes can only be covered by additional – more specific – textbooks.
Thirdly, most books are written by academics. While this is typical – and not per se a bad thing – it means that many books/and or chapters have a bias towards conceptual and/or theoretic work. Moreover, the fact that most textbooks are edited volumes implies that it is hard for a single authors’ team to present all facets of WE as a discipline.
Finally, as a result from our analysis we can state that we are still lacking a textbook that is tailored to teaching Web engineering. Even if the discipline gains in maturity there is still a variety of methods, techniques and tools stemming from different Web related communities, which are not yet thoroughly evaluated against each other and far from being established or standardized. 7. Murugesan, S., Deshpande, Y.: Web Engineering - Managing Diversity and Complexity of
Web Application Development, Springer 2001. ISBN: 978-3540421306; 355 pages. 8. Dumke, R., Lother, M., Wille, C., Zbrog, F.: Web Engineering, Pearson 2003. ISBN: 9783827370808; 473 pages. 9. Suh, W.: Web Engineering: Principles and Techniques. IGI Global, 2005. ISBN: 9781591404323; 364 pages. 10.Mendes, E., Mosley, N.: Web Engineering, Springer 2006. ISBN: 978-3540281962; 438 pg. 11.Kappel, G., Pröll, B., Reich, S., Retschitzegger, W.: Web Engineering – The Discipline of Systematic Development of Web Applications, Wiley 2006. ISBN: 978-0470015544; 366 pages. http://www.web-engineering.at/ 12.Rossi, G., Pastor, O., Schwabe, D., Olsina, L.: Web Engineering: Modelling and
Implementing Web Applications, Springer 2007. ISBN: 978-1-84628-922-4; 464 pages.
13. Mishra, J.: Web Engineering and Its Applications, Narosa Pub House, 2008. ISBN:
9788173199172; 232 pages.
14.Pressmann, R. S., Lowe, D.: Web Engineering: A Practioner's Approach, McGraw Hill
Higher Education, 2008. ISBN: 978-0073523293; 458 pages.
http://www.rspa.com/about/webe.html
15.Casteleyn, S., Daniel, F., Dolog, P., Matera, M.: Engineering Web Applications, Springer
2009. ISBN: 978-3540922001; 349 pages.
16.Berners-Lee, T., Hall, W., Hendler, J. A., O'Hara, K., Shadbolt, N. and Weitzner, D. J.
(2006) A Framework for Web Science. Foundations and Trends in Web Science, 1 (