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. 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.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, modeling 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.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, modeling 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.
