DESIGNING QUALITY WEB APPLICATIONS USING PATTERNS Stephanos M. Mavromoustakos Department of Computer Science, The Philips College, 4-6 Lamias Str., 2001 - P.O.Box 28008, 2090 Nicosia, Cyprus Andreas S. Andreou Department of Computer Science, University of Cyprus, 75 Kallipoleos Str., P.O.Box 20537, CY1678, Nicosia, Cyprus Keywords: Web Patterns, Quality Design, Web Engineering Abstract: Patterns are commonly utilized by Web developers for reusability purposes. However, this paper shows how Web patterns can also enhance the quality of Web applications. Firstly, Web quality is divided into five major components, namely usability, functionality, reliability, efficiency, and maintainability. Secondly, the relationship of these quality components with certain Web patterns is demonstrated and a set of guidelines for designing quality Web applications using these patterns is proposed. A successful Web site is then used as a case- study to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed guidelines. The Web patterns utilized by the site under study are identified and matched with the proposed list of patterns. Finally, we investigated how these patterns contribute to the success of the specific Web application. 1 INTRODUCTION The World Wide Web has become the most popular platform for communication, e-commerce and other applications, enabling the sharing and retrieving of information among users and organizations around the globe. At the same time, the need for continuing evolution of the Web applications (Webapps), contributes to the increase of their complexity. Therefore, Webapps present an important challenge to the designer: How to improve the quality of Webapps in order to attract more users, increase sales, and enhance an organization’s image, and at the same time meet the short and tight delivery times to conform with the immediacy characteristic (Pressman, 2002). Web patterns are methods to describe best practices and good designs, capturing development experience in a way that it is possible for others to reuse this experience. In fact, the goal of Web patterns is to help Web developers resolve recurring problems encountered during the Web system development. Patterns can provide a shared language for understanding common problems and their solutions by understanding the structures and mechanisms of Web architectures and intelligibly reason about them. The purpose of this paper is not to introduce or explain Web patterns, but rather to show the importance of Web patterns in relation to the quality of Web applications (Webapps). Web quality is directly related to five major components, namely usability, functionality, reliability, efficiency, and maintainability. A Webapp must be built around these components, thus we demonstrate the relationship of the aforementioned components with specific Web patterns. Then we provide a set of guidelines and propose a way for applying these guidelines to produce a quality Webapp. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 examines Web quality components and Web patterns. In addition, design guidelines for Web patterns are proposed. Section 3 presents a detailed analysis of specific Web patterns present in a successful Webapp and maps these to the proposed design guidelines and finally, Section 4 draws the concluding remarks and suggests some steps for future work. 421 M. Mavromoustakos S. and S. Andreou A. (2004). DESIGNING QUALITY WEB APPLICATIONS USING PATTERNS. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, pages 421-424 DOI: 10.5220/0002637904210424 Copyright c  SciTePress