An Object-oriented Approach to Design, Specification, and Implementation of Hyperlink Structures Based on Usual Software Development

Alexander Fronk (Software-Technology, University of Dortmund, Germany)

Abstract: Different models and methodologies for the development of hypermedia systems and applications have emerged in the recent years. Software-technical methods and principles enriched with ideas mainly driven from the applications needs are often sponsor to those models and methodologies. Hence, they deal with very specific problems occurring in the hypermedia domain, thereby extending design notations like UML or State Charts and adapting them to modeling this domain. In the present paper, we propose a very usual software-technical approach to the development of hyperlink structures which form the basis for navigation in hyperdocuments. Our approach uses standard UML, algebraic specification and object-oriented implementation to cover the construction of hyperlink structures, from design through to specification and realization. We thereby equate the development of hypermedia documents with usual software development. Instead of adopting software-engineering and notations to hypermedial concerns, we adopt the latter to the former and show the advantages of this approach.

Keywords: hypermedia, methodologies, object-oriented languages, software engineering, systems development

Categories: D.2, D.2.10, D.3.2, I.7.2, K.6.1