The infrastructure used to deploy hypermedia applications over the World Wide Web has also been increasingly used to support software that has the majority of its logic implemented apart from Universal Resource Locators (URLs). We denote such software as web-based applications. Whilst there have been many observations about the difference between web-based application development environments and their more traditional counterparts, it is shown that one aspect of web-based application development that has received less attention is the software architecture of web-based applications. In this thesis we demonstrate the positive impact that an appropriate software architecture can have on creating easy-to-maintain web-based applications. / The first part of the thesis presents a taxonomy of web-based applications that is organised around abstraction layers, that highlight the role of software architecture and tiers that reflect the infrastructure of the web on which applications are deployed. It is shown that there is a systematic way to develop a software architecture for a web-based applications by projecting the high level abstract layers representing the application onto the tiers that define the distributed web infrastructure. The thesis next presents a new architecture for web-based applications targeted at lowering the cost of routine maintenance. Various tools that support the use of this architecture in the development process for web-based applications are then presented. The feasibility and usability of the architecture is demonstrated by the construction of several significant applications using it. Finally the new architecture proposed in the thesis is compared experimentally with the major current competitor architecture, which follows the so called model-view-controller pattern, in relation to an ease of maintenance criteria. It is shown that the new architecture has significant advantages over the model-view-controller pattern in making the maintenance of complex web-based applications easier. / Thesis (PhDInformationTechnology)--University of South Australia, 2006.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/267294 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Zhao, Weiquan. |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | copyright under review |
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