Community application editor: collaborative near real-time modeling and composition of microservice-based web applications

Abstract

Research shows a gap in terms of requirements elicitation between developers and endusers. Due to the low technical expertise of some members of online communities, they often cannot collaborate efficiently with developers and cannot provide continuous feedback during application development processes. However, collaborative modeling processes can play an important role in education, enforcing best-practices, support rapid prototyping and lower the communication and collaboration barriers between developers and end-users. This paper presents a tool for collaborative modeling of Web applications in near real-time and their automatic generation. Early evaluation with end-users in simulated community settings show promising results for the interplay of modeling and collaboration in requirements gathering and Web application design and development. We claim that near real-time modeling on the Web has the potential to bring together stakeholders during design and development and offers a new perspective on model-based Web Engineering.