The History of WebML Lessons Learned from 10 Years of Model-Driven Development of Web Applications

This work presents a retrospective analysis on the conceptual modeling language for Web applications called WebML, which was first defined about 10 years ago. WebML has been an incubator for research on conceptual modeling, exploiting existing experiences in the field and continuously addressing new challenges concerning abstractions, methods, tools, and technologies. People working on WebML are spread among universities, technology transfer centres, and a spin-off. In this paper, we illustrate the history of WebML, we summarize the essence of the approach, and we sketch the main research branches that spawned from the initial proposal. We describe how new trends in research, application development, methodology, and tool prototyping led to the continuous growth of the modeling language.