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The World Wide Web has become a major delivery platform for a variety of complex and sophisticated enterprise applications in several domains. In addition to their inherent multifaceted functionality, these Web applications exhibit complex behavior and place some unique demands on their usability, performance, security and ability to grow and evolve.
However, a vast majority of these applications continue to be developed in an ad-hoc way, contributing to problems of usability, maintainability, quality and reliability [1-4]. While Web development can benefit from established practices from other related disciplines, it has certain distinguishing characteristics that demand special considerations. In the recent years, there have been some developments towards addressing these problems and requirements. As an emerging discipline, Web engineering actively promotes systematic, disciplined and quantifiable approaches towards successful development of high-quality, ubiquitously usable Web-based systems and applications [1,2].
In particular, Web engineering focuses on the methodologies, techniques and tools that are the foundation of Web application development and which support their design, development, evolution, and evaluation. Web application development has certain characteristics that make it different from traditional software, information system, or computer application development.
Web engineering is multidisciplinary and encompasses contributions from diverse areas: systems analysis and design, software engineering, hypermedia/hypertext engineering, requirements engineering, human-computer interaction, user interface, information engineering, information indexing and retrieval, testing, modelling and simulation, project management, and graphic design and presentation.
Web engineering is neither a clone, nor a subset of software engineering, although both involve programming and software development. While Web Engineering uses software engineering principles, it encompasses new approaches, methodologies, tools, techniques, and guidelines to meet the unique requirements of Web-based applications.
For an introduction to Web engineering, see "Web Engineering: Introduction and Perspectives" by San Murugesan and Athula Ginige, Chapter 1 in "Web Engineering: Principles and Techniques" (Suh, W. ed.), Idea Group Publishing, 2005. http://www.idea-group.com/downloads/excerpts/01%20Suh.pdf
Proponents of web engineering supported the establishment of web engineering as a discipline at an early stage of web. First Workshop on Web Engineering was held in conjunction with World Wide Web Conference held in Brisbane, Australia, in 1998. San Murugesan, Yogesh Deshpande, Steve Hansen and Athula Ginige, from University of Western Sydney, Australia formally promoted web engineering a new discipline in the first ICSE workshop on Web Engineering in 1999 [1]. Since then they published a serial of papers in a number of journals, conferences and magazines to promote their view and got wide support. Major arguments for web engineering as a new discipline are:
However, it has been controversial, especially for people in other traditional disciplines such as software engineering, to recognize web engineering as a new field. The issue is how different and independent web engineering is, compared with other disciplines.
Main topics of Web engineering include, but are not limited to, the following areas:
1. San Murugesan, Yogesh Deshpande, Steve Hansen and Athula Ginige, "Web Engineering: A New Discipline for Development of Web_based Systems," Proceedings of the First International Conference of Software Engineering (ICSE) Workshop on Web Engineering, Los Angeles, USA, 1999. Also published in Web Engineering: Managing Diversity and Complexity of Web Application Development, San Murugesan and Yogesh Deshpande (Eds), LNCS 2016, Springer Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg, 2001.
2. Athula Ginige and San Murugesan, "Web Engineering: An Introduction," IEEE Multimedia, Vol. 8, No. 1, January 2001, pp 14-18.
3. Roger S Pressman, "Can Internet Applications be Engineered?" IEEE Software, Vol. 15, No. 5, Sep/Oct 1998, pp 104-110.
4. Roger S Pressman, "What a Tangled Web we Weave," IEEE Software, Jan/Feb 2001, Vol. 18, No.1, pp 18-21.
5. Yogesh Deshpande, and Steve Hansen, "Web Engineering: Creating Discipline among Disciplines," IEEE Multimedia, Vol. 8, No. 1, January 2001, pp 81-86.
6. Robert L Glass, "Who's Right in the Web Development Debate?" Cutter IT Journal, July 2001, Vol. 14, No.7, pp 6-10.
7. Gerti Kappel, Birgit Proll, Seiegfried, and Werner Retschitzegger, "An Introduction to Web Engineering," in Web Engineering, Gerti Kappel, et al (eds.) John Wiley and Sons, Heidelberg, Germany, 2003.
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