# Web engineering

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 behaviour 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 recent years, there have been developments towards addressing these considerations.
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 systems, 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, data engineering, information science, 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.

## As a discipline

Proponents of Web engineering supported the establishment of Web engineering as a discipline at an early stage of Web. Major arguments for Web engineering as a new discipline are:
* Web-based Information Systems (WIS) development process is different and unique.
* Web engineering is multi-disciplinary; no single discipline (such as software engineering) can provide a complete theory basis, body of knowledge and practices to guide WIS development.
* Issues of evolution and lifecycle management when compared to more 'traditional' applications.
* Web-based information systems and applications are pervasive and non-trivial. The prospect of Web as a platform will continue to grow and it is worth being treated specifically.
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:

### Modeling disciplines

* Business Processes for Applications on the Web
* Process Modelling of Web applications
* Requirements Engineering for Web applications
* B2B applications

### Design disciplines, tools, and methods

* UML and the Web
* Conceptual Modeling of Web Applications (aka. Web modeling)
* Prototyping Methods and Tools
* Web design methods
* CASE Tools for Web Applications
* Web Interface Design
* Data Models for Web Information Systems

### Implementation disciplines

* Integrated Web Application Development Environments
* Code Generation for Web Applications
* Software Factories for/on the Web
* Web 2.0, AJAX, E4X, ASP.NET, PHP and Other New Developments
* Web Services Development and Deployment

### Testing disciplines

* Testing and Evaluation of Web systems and Applications.
* Testing Automation, Methods, and Tools.

### Applications categories disciplines

* Semantic Web applications
* Document centric Web sites
* Transactional Web applications
* Interactive Web applications
* Workflow-based Web applications
* Collaborative Web applications
* Portal-oriented Web applications
* Ubiquitous and Mobile Web Applications
* Device Independent Web Delivery
* Localization and Internationalization of Web Applications
* Personalization of Web Applications

## Attributes
### Web quality

* Web Metrics, Cost Estimation, and Measurement
* Personalisation and Adaptation of Web applications
* Web Quality
* Usability of Web Applications
* Web accessibility
* Performance of Web-based applications

### Content-related

* Web Content Management
* Content Management System (CMS)
* Multimedia Authoring Tools and Software
* Authoring of adaptive hypermedia

## Education

* Master of Science: Web Engineering as a branch of study within the MSc program Web Sciences at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
* Diploma in Web Engineering: Web Engineering as a study program at the International Webmasters College (iWMC), Germany