Construction by Linking: The Linkbase Method

The success of many innovative Web applications is not based on the content they produce — but on how they combine and link existing content. Older Web Engineering methods lack flexibility in a sense that they rely strongly on a-priori knowledge of existing content structures and do not take into account initially unknown content sources. We propose the adoption of principles that are also found in Component-based Software Engineering, to assemble highly extensible solutions from reusable artifacts. The main contribution of our work is a support system, consisting of a central service that manages n:m relationships between arbitrary Web resources, and of Web application components that realize navigation, presentation, and interaction for the linked content.