A DIAGRAM APPROACH TO AUTOMATIC GENERATION OF
JSP/SERVLET WEB APPLICATIONS
Kornkamol Jamroendararasame, Tetsuya Suzuki and Takehiro Tokuda
Department of Computer Science
Tokyo Institute of Technology
Tokyo 152-8552, Japan
email: {konkamol,tetsuya,tokuda}@tt.cs.titech.ac.jp
ABSTRACT
We defined diagrams called Web transition diagrams to rep-
resent overall behavior of Web applications. Using these
diagrams, we can generate server program type Web ap-
plications such as CGI-based Web applications, and server
page type Web applications such as ASP-based Web appli-
cations.
The purpose of this paper is to design Web transi-
tion diagrams to represent wider class of Web applications
based on JavaServer Pages (JSP)/Servletarchitecture. Then
we present an automatic generation method of JSP/Servlet
Web applications from these diagrams. We implement a
software system called T-Web system which enables Web
application designers to visually compose Web transition
diagrams and generate Web applications from these dia-
grams without any manual programming. T-Web system
can generate both HTML-based Web pages and XML-
based Web pages for Web applications. Generated Web
applications support standard level of security against at-
tacks, the use of HTTP cookies, user authentication, and
session management.
KEY WORDS
Web application, JSP, Java servlet
1 Introduction
Nowadays, the use of Web applications for data transac-
tion has been immensely increasing. Because of the sud-
den growth of Web application technologies, the develop-
ment of Web applications becomes more and more difficult
not only for non-programmers but also for experienced pro-
grammers.
Even in the development of small size Web applica-
tions, we have to consider the consistency among applica-
tion components, security against attacks and methods to
protect Web users’ personal information.
We defined Web transition diagrams to describe over-
all behavior of Web applications and an automatic gen-
eration method of Web applications from these diagrams.
Then we implemented a CGI-based Web application gen-
erator [1, 2] and an ASP-based Web application generator
[3] using a method called template method. However, these
generators have following restrictions.
• Newly created templates cannot be treated as prede-
fined templates.
• They can generate either HTML-based Web pages [4]
or XML-based Web pages [5], but not both.
• They cannot generate advanced structural Web pages.
In this paper, we propose the following enhancement.
1. Web transition diagrams that can represent wider class
of Web applications based on JSP/Servlet architecture.
Integration of server program type technology servlet
[6] and server page type technology JSP [7] is possi-
ble.
2. A JSP/Servlet-based Web application generator which
accepts any number of additional templates for Web
page elements or programs. Generated Web applica-
tions support standard level of security against attacks,
the use of HTTP cookies, user authentication, and ses-
sion management.
We implement a software system called T-Web sys-
tem. Using T-Web system, Web application designers
including non-programmers can design JSP/Servlet-based
Web applications in terms of Web transition diagrams and
generate Web applications based on both HTML and XML
pages from the complete diagrams.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In sec-
tion 2, we explain Web transition diagrams. In section 3,
we describe and illustrate our JSP/Servlet-based Web ap-
plication generator. In section 4, we compare our approach
with other approaches. In section 5, we give concluding
remarks.
2 Web Transition Diagrams
This section presents the definition, notation and an exam-
ple of Web transition diagrams. Web transition diagrams
are directed graphs that can describe structures and over-
all behavior of general Web applications. They represent
both the flow of data through Web application components
(e.g. Web pages, programs, and databases) and hyperlink
