Vol.3 No.1 May, 2004

Editorial & In This Issue (pp001-002)
        Y. Deshpande
Research Articles and Reviews:
Function Clone Detection in Web Applications: A Semiautomated Approach (pp003-021)
        F. Calefato, F. Lanubile and T. Mallardo
Many web applications use a mixture of HTML and scripting language code as the front-end to business services, where scripts can run on both the client and server side.   Analogously to traditional applications, code duplication occurs frequently during the development and evolution of web applications. This ad-hoc but pathological form of reuse consists in copying, and eventually modifying, a block of existing code that implements a piece of required functionality. Duplicated blocks are named clones and the act of copying, including slight modifications, is called cloning. When entire functions are copied rather than fragments, duplicated functions are called function clones.   This paper describes how a semiautomated approach can be used to identify cloned functions within scripting code of web applications. The approach is based on the automatic selection of potential function clones and the visual inspection of selected script functions. The results obtained from the clone analysis of four web applications show that the semiautomated approach is both effective and efficient at identifying function clones in web applications, and can be applied to prevent clone from spreading or to remove redundant scripting code.

Integration of Business Processes in Web Application Models (pp022-049)
        N. Koch, A. Kraus, C. Cachero and S. Meliá
Business processes, regarded as heavy-weighted flows of control consisting of activities and transitions, play an increasingly important role in Web applications. In order to address these business processes, Web methodologies are evolving to support its definition and integration with the Web specific aspects of content, navigation and presentation.   This paper presents the modeling support provided for this kind of processes by the Object-Oriented Hypermedia method (OO-H) and the UML-based Web Engineering (UWE) approach. Both methods apply UML use cases and activity diagrams, and supply UML standard modeling extensions. Additionally, the connection mechanisms between the navigation and the process specific modeling elements are discussed. As a representative example to illustrate our approach we present the requirements, analysis and design models for the www.amazon.com Website with focus on the checkout process. Our approach includes requirements and analysis models shared by OO-H and UWE and provides the basis on which each method applies its particular design notation for business processes.

A Genre Perspective on OnlineNewspaper FrontPage Design (pp050-074)
        C. Ihlström and J. Lundberg
Taking a genre perspective on design, this article proposes eight design recommendations for online newspapers. These recommendations are based on features that mediate a specific purpose and use between publisher and audience, which we describe as genre rules in terms of purpose, form, and positioning. They are also based on genre change regarding design, and the heritage from print regarding form and shared content elements. We have a) studied genre change through a web page analysis of nine Swedish online newspapers in 2001 and 2003, using the genre concepts content, form, functionality and positioning, and b) derived genre rules through publishers and audience understanding of the genre. We have interviewed managers, designers and editors-in-chief at the nine newspapers as well as 153 members of their audience. We show that in the design process for digital documents, it is useful to have genre awareness, i.e. to be aware of the genre characteristics, the producer's design purpose and the audience recognition and response.

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