An Analysis of Textbooks for Web Engineering

Birgit Prll1, Siegfried Reich2,

1

Johannes Kepler University Linz,

Altenbergerstr. 69, 4040 Linz, Austria
bproell@faw.jku.at
2
Salzburg Research, Jakob Haringer Str. 5,
5020 Salzburg, Austria
siegfried.reich@salzburgresearch.at

Abstract. Educating students and computer science professionals in Web

Engineering skills is an increasingly important topic. However, due to the
infancy of Web Engineering as a discipline, it is a challenge to provide
appropriate learning materials. In this paper we analyze textbooks dealing with
Web Engineering. We introduce a scheme for comparison and provide a
qualitative assessment of 11 textbooks issued over the last 13 years.
Keywords: textbooks, learning material, comparison.

1 Introduction
Web Engineering (WE) is both a subject of research as well as a set of skills that
computer science professionals increasingly need to understand. But even though
there is a plethora of resources available (text books, individual chapters, and also
online resources google.com for instance lists 352.000 entries on the term Web
Engineering, yahoo.com even offers 5,670.000 hits1), it is difficult to find
appropriate course material. We believe there are several reasons for that: firstly, Web
Engineering as a discipline is not yet as mature as e.g. software engineering;
secondly, given the speed of change and hype in Web technologies, it is difficult to
provide up-to-date learning materials (as books); thirdly, as is true for software
engineering, the subject is complex and can only be taught in a constructivist way [1].
Finally, Web Engineering is clearly interdisciplinary and encompasses technologies,
applications, business models, and process models as well as themes like Semantic
Web and other domains [2]. Therefore, the following market analysis of existing
textbooks on Web Engineering attempts to give an overview of the type of books that
are available and discusses their appropriateness as teaching resource for courses on
Web Engineering.
Given the broadness of the term Web Engineering we need to provide a
definition for focusing our work. We refer to the following definition [3]: (1) Web
Engineering is the application of systematic and quantifiable approaches (concepts,
1

Both searches were performed with the term Web Engineering on April 20, 2010.

methods, techniques, tools) to cost-effective requirements analysis, design,

implementation, testing, operation, and maintenance of high-quality Web
applications. (2) Web Engineering is also the scientific discipline concerned with the
study of these approaches. This definition follows very much a software engineering
perspective; as an emerging discipline Web Engineering is still very dynamic and
upcoming topics such as Web Science or GeoWeb need to be included in this
definition. We have structured this paper as follows. The following Section 2
addresses related work; Section three outlines the research method; Section 4 then
provides the analysis of our work. And finally, Section 5 presents conclusions.

2 Related Work
Mendes at al. [4] provide a systematic review of Web Engineering research by
analyzing 173 research papers. In particular they focus on the research contribution
and methodological soundness of research papers and conclude that only a minority
of papers are methodologically sound.
Navarro [2] provides a comprehensive view of research literature available to the
Web Engineering community. He analyses 700 papers in various journals from a
Software Engineering Body of Knowledge perspective. His conclusions are that
Web Engineering is still an emerging discipline, which is heterogeneous with a nonempty intersection with software engineering.
Hadjerrouit [1] addresses the issue of teaching Web Engineering from a
pedagogical point of view. He argues that there are three types of skills to be taught
(using a constructivist approach):
-

Prerequisite skills, e.g., object-oriented development and programming with

UML and an object-oriented language such as Java; database development
with JDBC and relational databases; Web programming with Javascript, etc.;
knowledge of structured documents, in particular, XHMTL, HTML5, etc.

Specific skills: this is where we believe textbooks should have their main
focus; in particular, they should focus on process models, requirements
engineering, design, deployment and testing;

Generic skills: Project management and planning; design based on re-use

principles; reading and writing skills; dialogue und communication with
stakeholders

In summarizing, even though there are some extensive analyses available, they all
focus on research papers. Therefore, to the best of our knowledge there is no work
on comparing textbooks for Web Engineering.

3 Research Method
For our analysis, we started by collecting and comparing 11 existing textbooks on
Web Engineering, which are listed with their full bibliography in Section 3.

As a next step, we split our analysis into several dimensions. The first dimension
concerns the type of publication. We distinguished between course book, edited
volume, introductory texts, etc. The second dimension concerns the educational setup
(i.e., examples, glossary, additional literature, etc). The third dimension deals with
general criteria, here we categorized visual appearance; structure and outline;
comprehensibility; and appropriateness. Finally, we had a look at the contents of the
books from a thematic, i.e., Web Engineering, point of view.
It should be pointed out that we did not take into account books published as
conference proceedings, such as Web Engineering: 9th International Conference,
ICWE 2009 San Sebastin, Spain, June 24-26 2009. We would also like to stress that
we excluded books specifically targeted at technologies, e.g. Building web
applications with Ruby2.

4 Results of the Analysis

We start our presentation by providing a tag cloud3. Fig.1 has been generated using
the table of contents available from the textbooks of this analysis. We provided up to
the first three levels of the ToCs hierarchy, converted all terms to US-English and
changed plural to singular in order to focus the themes/tags.

Fig. 1. Tag cloud generated by wordle.net with 11 textbooks on Web Engineering.

By looking at the tag cloud it becomes apparent that design, application,

development, process, modeling and development are prominent terms. Actually, we
would have thought that architecture would get some more importance but
2
3

Please note that this is only an example!

This tag cloud has been generated with http://wordle.net/

apparently it does not occur often enough in titles of chapters and/or sections. The
non-focus on technologies on the other hand makes sense in that the books selected
are targeted on the process and engineering aspects.
In the following, we briefly characterize the books we have chosen:
(1) Powell, T., Jones, D., Cutts, D.: Web Site Engineering Beyond Web Page
Design, Prentice Hall 1998, 324 pages. This book written from a practitioners
view is the earliest of books on WE we analyzed. Starting from the fact that
static Web pages have evolved into Web applications the ten book chapters
discuss Web specific issues according to the software development life cycle,
ranging from problem definition and requirement analysis to Web site promotion
and maintenance. The book ends with business related concerns.
(2) Lowe, D., Hall, W.: Hypermedia and the Web: An Engineering Approach. Wiley,
1999, 626 pages: This book comprising twelve chapters is (also) an early book
on WE. It is motivated by the fact that at the time of writing 1999 many Web
applications were available but that it also had become clear that these
applications do not take advantage of the sound engineering principles that were
of benefit to the software industry. The book therefore focuses on the
(hypermedia) development process of Web applications. Furthermore, about a
third of the book is dedicated to current and future research activities.
(3) Murugesan, S., Deshpande, Y.: Web Engineering Managing Diversity and
Complexity of Web Application Development, Springer 2001, 355 pages. This
edited volume argues for and provides the scope of the discipline Web
Engineering, which only recently emerged at the time of its publication. The
introductory part is a discussion on WE tasks, contributing disciplines and WEs
delimitation of computer science, information systems, and software
engineering. The remaining five parts address WE issues (ranging from
process/methodology to maintenance/reuse) each with an overview followed by
two to seven adequately selected research contributions most of them originating
from contributions to WE related conferences.
(4) Dumke, R., Lother, M., Wille, C., Zbrog, F.: Web Engineering, Pearson 2003,
473 pages. This book written in German comprises three parts (foundations,
Web system development, domain specific aspects) and clearly focuses on the
development of systems from a software engineering point of view. It is the only
book with explicit properties of textbooks such as review questions at the end of
each chapter, etc.
(5) Suh, W.: Web Engineering: Principles and Techniques. IGI Global, 2005, 364
pages. This is an edited book with six sections, ranging from concepts and a
reference model, Web application development, metrics and quality issues,
maintenance to Web intelligence. Overall fifteen chapters, written very much
from a research perspective.
(6) Mendes, E., Mosley, N.: Web Engineering, Springer 2006, 438 pages. After an
introduction to Web Engineering this edited volume comprises 10 chapters
covering important WE issues, which can be grouped into three WE related
perspectives: project management including Web effort estimation, Web quality

issues and Web modelling approaches. Another two chapters are dedicated to a
non WE specific introduction to statistical techniques and empirical methods.
Each chapter is self-contained by providing a thorough presentation of the
subject, mostly followed by some (research) approach of the authors and
illustrated by a case study.
(7) Kappel, G., Prll, B., Reich, S., Retschitzegger, W.: Web Engineering The
Discipline of Systematic Development of Web Applications, Wiley 2006, 366
pages. This edited book is based on the German book Web Engineering
Systematische Entwickung von Web-Anwendungen by the same co-editors,
published in 2004 by dpunkt. The book starts with a classification of Web
applications and its determining characteristics, serving as a basic frame for the
forthcoming chapters, which are arranged in three parts approach (project
management and process), product development and quality aspects. A chapter
on the Semantic Web provides an outlook to future developments.
(8) Rossi, G., Pastor, O., Schwabe, D., Olsina, L.: Web Engineering: Modelling and
Implementing Web Applications, Springer 2007, 464 pages. This book is an
edited volume with fifteen chapters and three parts, focusing on Web
applications development, Web design methods and qualitative aspects of Web
Engineering. Besides the typical introductory chapter it also has a chapter
named Conclusions that links the various subparts together.
(9) Pressmann, R. S., Lowe, D.: Web Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach,
McGraw Hill Higher Education, 2008, 458 pages. This is a recent book
comprising seventeen chapters that are grouped around a general model of
WebApps process activities (communication, planning, modeling, construction
and deployment). The book almost has a non-focus on technologies (the authors
argue they are too many and too diverse to be covered in the book as well).
There is a coherent example throughout the book.
(10) Mishra, J.: Web Engineering and Its Applications, Narosa Pub House, 2008,
232 pages. This is a collection of research papers, attempting to combine the
aspects of modeling and implementation. There are some rather technical papers
(Internet backbone infrastructure, search crawlers, etc.) which at some point
seem very specific (albeit relevant). The chapters also vary quite a bit in length
and style.
(11) Casteleyn, S., Daniel, F., Dolog, P., Matera, M.: Engineering Web Applications,
Springer 2009, 349 pages. This textbook prepends a chapter on technologies,
follows the typical development process with an extension on adaptation in its
core part and ends with a contribution to semantic Web and Web 2.0 issues. The
authors assembled a variety of Web relevant methods, techniques and tools from
the software engineering and from the Web modeling & design perspective.
The following Table 1 summarizes our analysis results wrt. the dimension type of
book. We distinguish between course book, edited volume (i.e., books with
different authors for the individual chapters), introductory text (whereby we mean
whether concepts, techniques and methods are explained in more detail with practical
examples) and Web resource (i.e., whether additional information is available on

the Web). As can be seen from the table, only a few books are course books and most
of them are edited volumes (which may be an indication of the diverse and multidisciplinary nature of WE, see also the conclusions).
Table 1. Types of Web Engineering textbooks.
Type of Book
Authors
Powell et al. 1998
Lowe et al. 1999
Murugesan et al. 2001
Dumke et al. 2003
Suh 2005
Mendes et al. 2006
Kappel et al. 2006
Rossi et al. 2007
Pressmann at al. 2008
Mishra 2008
Casteleyn et al. 2009

Course Book

Edited Volume

Introductory Text








partly
partly

Web Resource












partly

Table 2 provides an overview of the didactical setup we have analyzed. We have

analyzed whether learning targets have been identified, examples are given, a glossary
is provided, summaries are provided, and finally, whether additional literature to
deepen learning is discussed. Again, as can be seen from the table, only one book
offers specific learning targets and only few offer examples.
Table 2. Didactical set-up of Web Engineering textbooks.
Didactical Set-up
Learning Targets
Authors
Powell et al. 1998


Lowe et al. 1999


Murugesan et al. 2001


Dumke et al. 2003


Suh 2005


Mendes et al. 2006


Kappel et al. 2006


Rossi et al. 2007


Pressmann et al. 2008


Mishra 2008


Casteleyn et al. 2009

Examples










case studies








partly

Glossary






list of abbreviations

list of abbreviations

Summaries




paper conclusions

paper conclusions

partly
common example

Add. Literature












partly
partly

Table 3 provides details on general criteria of the textbooks. We distinguish

between visual appearance (how is the text presented, quality of figures, usage of
accentuations, b/w vs. color, etc.), structure and outline (overall structuredness, selfcontainedness of chapters for cross-reading, index, etc.), comprehensibility (lively and
clear language, explanation of technical terms), appropriateness (for students,
practitioners, researchers, etc.). The analysis is done in a qualitative way.
As can be seen from the Table, especially the edited books often comprising of
chapters of individual research papers vary greatly in style and appearance (and are
thus not ideal as textbooks). Also, even though most of the covers argue that the
contents would be suitable for practitioners, some of the books really focus on
researchers.

Table 3. General Criteria of textbooks on Web Engineering.

General Criteria
Authors

Visual Appearance

Structure and Outline

Comprehensibility

Appropriateness

Powell el al. 1998

simple graphics and

screenshots

follows software development life cycle,

plus business concerns

easy to read

practitioners

Lowe et al. 1999

b/w, excellent graphics, focuses on hypermedia development and

even though the book has a
good layout
processes; 1/3 on research activities
research touch it is good to read,
wording is well done; the
coherence of the overall parts and
individual chapters is given; also,
although it is mulit-authored there
is a consistent quality

Murugesan et al. 2001 "standard" research paper except for the introductory part and the
style of appearance; good structuring in WE relevant parts each
to read, adequate layout
including an introduction, similar to a
conference proceeding

highly readable introduction into

WE followed by high quality
research papers

researchers and
practitioners

researchers

Dumke et al. 2003

high readability, figures in very much from a systems and software

same structural approach
students, practitioners,
consistent style, using
engineering point of view, 16 chapters throughout all chapters, written by
researchers
UML, highlighting of
divided into three parts (foundations,
the same set of authors, good use
important text
system development (core), domain
of examples
specific development)

Suh 2005

"Standard" research paper

style of appearance; good
to read, good layout;
individual notations in
figures

six parts with varying numbers of

chapters, therefore partly imbalanced
and somewhat serendipitous

overall good; however, as an

edited volume it very much
depends on the individual authors'
contributions

Mendes et al. 2006

"standard" research paper

style of appearance; good
to read (dependent on
chapter), adequate layout

coherence of the chapters is not

reflected; mixture of WE related parts
and non WE related chapters; each
chapter in itself follows the same
thorough structure

overall good; depending on the target audience differs:

individual authors' contributions; some chapter target on
chapter differ in writing style
researchers, others also
dependent on the chapter's target
on
audience
practitioners/students

Kappel 2006

good graphics and layout

2 chapters on project
management/process, main part (7
chapters) on product development
according to the development process, 3
chapters on quality aspects; future:
semantic web

Rossi et al. 2007

"Standard" research paper main part (9 of 15 chapters) on Web

style of appearance; good Design Models; a introductory chapter
to read, good layout;
and a conclusions chapter provide the
individual notations in
necessary links
figures

Pressmann et al. 2008

b/w, excellent graphics, outlines a Web Engineering process and

clear language, one example
scenario that is used throughout the
good use of UML,
then has dedicated chapters for the
excellent printing quality various activities aligned to the process; book, question & answer type of
has almost a non-focus on technologies
style for communication

Mishra 2008

mixed style, multiple 20 chapters with varying subjects, length

authors, research papers
and style

Casteleyn et al. 2009

good graphics and layout

preceeding chapter on technologies, 6

chapters following the development
process, outlook chapter

researchers

dependent on chapter

students, practitioners,
researchers

overall good; however, as an

edited volume it very much
depends on the individual authors'
contributions

researchers

mixed, depending on author

practitioners, also
researchers

researchers

good to read, in parts mixture of students, practitioners,

sw-perspective and Web modeling
researchers
perspective

Finally, in Table 4 we provide the results of our analysis according to themes

covered.
As a basis for our analysis, we follow the classification of Pressman Software
Engineering Resources4, which we extend by themes such as new issues arising from
Web Science (including legal aspects or SNA) and therefore come up with the
following criteria:
4

http://www.rspa.com/spi/#webe, last visited on April 20, 2010.

Web Engineering Process: characteristics of the Web, general WE

information, WE process, Web authoring guides, Web metrics
- Formulation and Planning: project planning and formulation for Web
applications
- Analysis Modeling for Web Applications: analysis concepts for the Web,
analysis methods
- Design Modeling for Web Applications: general topics, design principles,
design methods (e.g., OOHDM), content design, architectural design, interface
design, usability design, navigation design, Web design style guides,
technology issues
- Testing of Web Applications: general testing resources, testing/qa articles and
papers, navigation and configuration testing, usability testing, security and
performance testing, testing tools
- Web Science extensions (i.e. issues going beyond common WE tasks): legal
and privacy issues, business aspects, social network analysis, Web governance,
models of Web structure and Web growth etc. [16]
- Specific Features and Future Developments: Semantic Web, GeoWeb, etc.

Table 4. Themes and contents of textbooks on Web Engineering.

Web Engineering Themes Covered

Authors
Powell et al. 1998
Lowe et al. 1999
Murugesan e al. 2001
Dumke et al. 2003
Suh 2005
Mendes et al. 2006
Kappel et al. 2006
Rossi et al. 2007
Pressmann et al. 2008
Mishra 2008
Casteleyn et al. 2009

Web Engineering
Process




partly




partly

Analysis
Design Modelling
Web
for Web
Formulation and Modelling of Web
Testing of Web Science
Planning
Applications
Applications
Applications extensions
















































partly








partly
















partly










partly

Specific Features and

Future Development
business concerns






general outlook
cost estimation
Semantic Web
general outlook
general outlook
general outlook
adaptation
Semantic Web, Web 2.0/3.0

As can be seen from the table most books cover the Web engineering process and
all activities of the Web application development cycle. However, in more detail, the
presentations of these phases vary significantly with respect to the timeliness of its
content, (e.g. the disciplines evolution implies the risk of outdated content), the
extent (i.e. most books focus on one or a few specific methods instead of providing a
comprehensive overview and evaluation), and the viewpoint they approach the issue
from (i.e. SW engineer perspective vs. Web modeling & design perspective). Future
developments are included by more recent books as add-on, while Web Science
extensions, e.g. legal or business issues are rarely discussed.

5 Summary and Conclusions

In this contribution we have provided an analysis of 11 books on Web Engineering.
We have structured our work in different dimensions (type of book, didactical set-up,
overall readability and themes covered) and we have given some details on the results
for each of the books.
In concluding, we want to stress the following:
-

From a didactical point of view we agree with Hadjerrouit [1] in that the
subject of Web Engineering can only be taught if a) sufficient basic knowledge
is available and b) there are accompanying lectures (practical course work) that
allow students to actually understand the topics by working themselves (this is
referred to as constructivist approach).

Secondly, the discipline is emerging rapidly and it seems to become even

broader. Web Science and/or Geoweb are but two aspects of emerging topics.
We believe that these themes can only be covered by additional more
specific textbooks.

Thirdly, most books are written by academics. While this is typical and not
per se a bad thing it means that many books/and or chapters have a bias
towards conceptual and/or theoretic work. Moreover, the fact that most
textbooks are edited volumes implies that it is hard for a single authors team
to present all facets of WE as a discipline.

Finally, as a result from our analysis we can state that we are still lacking a
textbook that is tailored to teaching Web engineering. Even if the discipline gains in
maturity there is still a variety of methods, techniques and tools stemming from
different Web related communities, which are not yet thoroughly evaluated against
each other and far from being established or standardized.

References
1. Hadjerrouit, S.: Designing a Pedagogical Model for Web Engineering Education: An
Evolutionary Perspective. Journal of Information Technology Education, Volume 4, 2005,
pp. 115 - 140
2. Navarro, A.: A SWEBOK-based Viewpoint of the Web Engineering Discipline. Journal of
Universal Computer Science, vol. 15, no. 17 (2009), 3169-3200
3. Kappel, G., Prll, B., Reich, S., Retschitzegger, W.: An Introduction to Web Engineering in
Web Engineering, Ed. Kappel, G., et al. ,Wiley 2006.
4. Mendes, E.: A systematic review of Web engineering research. 2005 International
Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering (ISESE 2005), pp. 498-507.
5. Powell, T., Jones, D., Cutts, D.: Web Site Engineering Beyond Web Page Design. Prentice
Hall 1998. ISBN: 978-0136509202; 324 pages.
6. Lowe, D., Hall, W.: Hypermedia and the Web: An Engineering Approach. Wiley, 1999.
ISBN: 978-0471983125; 626 pages.

7. Murugesan, S., Deshpande, Y.: Web Engineering - Managing Diversity and Complexity of
Web Application Development, Springer 2001. ISBN: 978-3540421306; 355 pages.
8. Dumke, R., Lother, M., Wille, C., Zbrog, F.: Web Engineering, Pearson 2003. ISBN: 9783827370808; 473 pages.
9. Suh, W.: Web Engineering: Principles and Techniques. IGI Global, 2005. ISBN: 9781591404323; 364 pages.
10.Mendes, E., Mosley, N.: Web Engineering, Springer 2006. ISBN: 978-3540281962; 438 pg.
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Systematic Development of Web Applications, Wiley 2006. ISBN: 978-0470015544; 366
pages. http://www.web-engineering.at/
12.Rossi, G., Pastor, O., Schwabe, D., Olsina, L.: Web Engineering: Modelling and
Implementing Web Applications, Springer 2007. ISBN: 978-1-84628-922-4; 464 pages.
13. Mishra, J.: Web Engineering and Its Applications, Narosa Pub House, 2008. ISBN: 9788173199172; 232 pages.
14.Pressmann, R. S., Lowe, D.: Web Engineering: A Practioner's Approach, McGraw Hill
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ISBN:
978-0073523293;
458
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http://www.rspa.com/about/webe.html
15.Casteleyn, S., Daniel, F., Dolog, P., Matera, M.: Engineering Web Applications, Springer
2009. ISBN: 978-3540922001; 349 pages.
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(2006) A Framework for Web Science. Foundations and Trends in Web Science, 1 (1), 2006