10 years of WebRatio is a good occasion for thinking about the path that led from a university research project to a recognized modeling language (WebML) and a solid, industrialized version of a toolsuite (WebRatio). The main ingredient of our history are basically: - a substrate for cross-fertilization coming from European Research projects (W3I3, WebSI, Cooper, BPM4People, ...) - valuable inputs and requirements from customers (both final customers and software integrators) - a strong research team that continuously worked on innovating the approach - the teaching activities within the university - and the professional developers and analysts at Web Models that work hard for making a good product out of the rough ideas and experiments produced in the university. These ingredients allowed more than 10 years of evolution of the language and the tool. I tried to summarized this in the virtuous cycle of our experience. While research provides innovation to both teaching and industrialization, and finally produces the upto date version of the language and methodology. The tool vendor provides the tool itself and also requirements coming from real industrial customers. The tool is extremely useful for teaching and research purposes not only within our group, but throughout the world (thanks to an academic program that allows education institutions to get free licenses of the tool). The role of customer is crucial in this picture, because it's from their input (business, technical and UI requirements) that we extract the actual needs of the industry. The whole innovation cycle start there. Furthermore, customers provide feedback and feasibility/acceptability check upon our findings and solutions. This virtuous cycle has been able to carry the core idea of the WebML language through 10 years of history in the product (and 15 years of history of the language). The lesson learned is that, if you have a core concept which is flexible and innovable, a good strategy can lead to continuous evolution, improvement and expansion of the idea. In these years the language underwent a huge number of incremental additions: support of web services support of business processes support of semantic web features support of RIA - AJAX features If you want to get a flavour of the experience, you may check out this paper, published in John Mylopoulos Festschrift by Springer:S. Ceri, M. Brambilla, P. Fraternali: “The History of WebML Lessons Learned from 10 Years of Model-Driven Development of Web Applications“. In book: Conceptual Modeling: Foundations and Applications, Essays in honor of John Mylopoulos, Springer LNCS, Festschrift series, vol. 5600, 2009, pp. 273-292

1. WebML WebML 10 (or 15?) years, without showing it Marco Brambilla Politecnico di Milano marco.brambilla@polimi.itmarcobrambimarcobrambi

3. The strategy

5. The need Conceptual modeling Abstraction from the technology .. But NOT From the technological opportunities From the requirements Innovation Extensibility

6. The Strategy Virtuous innovation cycle

7. The Strategy Retrospective Virtuous Cycle At two levels: Macro-innovations Refinement of each innovation Repeatability of the experience.. Not granted!

8. innovation Research (Politecnico) Tool vendor (WebRatio) Toolsuite, industrial requirements Teaching (university courses) innovation toolsuite WebML Design method, language, and platform innovation Customers (requirement providers) requirements use cases Final customers (EU) Research Project consortia Software houses and integrators

9. The history “Amarcord”? (F. Fellini, 1973)

10. 1. AutoWeb Once upon a time ... 1998 W3I3 project The research starts

11. 2. WebML And then ... 1999 Teaching and consolidation at Politecnico

12. 3. WebML in action And then ... 2000 The first “customer”

13. 3. WebML in action And then ... 2000 The first “customer” No company or product yet Features implemented at night in Italy upon customers request in the US during the day 

14. 4. Web Services And then ... 2003 SOA, Services, Mashups First research solution:

15. 4. Web Services And then ... 2005 Refinement and implementation

16. 5. Business Processes And then ... 2004 Business processes andorchestrations Research proposal:

17. 5. Business Processes And then ... 2010 Industrial implementation and refinement Directly in the WebRatio tool After a few years (based on customers need)

18. 6. Semantic Web And then ... 2005

19. 6. Semantic Web Still a research project only But.. What about the future? Linked data, ...

20. 7. RIA - AJAX And then ... 2005 Rich Web interfaces Theoretical model in the research group And simplified model implemented in the tool immediately available Future: a new, comprehensive model coming up

21. 8. Social Web / BPM Today

22. 8. Social Web / BPM Oggi

23. 9. Standardization Today Strategic effort within OMG (Object Management Group)

24. 9. ... What about the future? Search, Interfaces, Modernization And...?

25. Conclusion Virtuous cycle