Designing Adaptive Web Applications

The unique characteristic of web applications is that they are supposed to be used by much bigger and diverse set of users and stakeholders. An example application area is e-Learning or business to business interaction. In eLearning environment, various users with different background use the eLearning system to study a discipline. In business to business interaction, different requirements and parameters of exchanged business requests might be served by different services from third parties. Such applications require certain intelligence and a slightly different approach to design. Adpative web-based applications aim to leave some of their features at the design stage in the form of variables which are dependent on several criteria. The resolution of the variables is called adaptation and can be seen from two perspectives: adaptation by humans to the changed requirements of stakeholders and dynamic system adaptation to the changed parameters of environments, user or context. Adaptation can be seen as an orthogonal concern or viewpoint in a design process. In this paper I will discuss design abstractions which are employed in current design methods for web applications. I will exemplify the use of the abstractions on eLearning web applications as well as on applications for business to business interaction based on web services.