Light-weight and Scalable Hierarchical-MVC Architecture for Cloud Web Applications

Nowadays, with the prevalence of cloud computing, the demand for modular and scalable Web application development technologies is urgent. Dynamic contents and ubiquitous user interactions make Web applications increasingly complicated. A majority of current web applications leverage a Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural style. Since the MVC triad does not provide feature-based modularization, Web applications in pure MVC style are experiencing scalability and maintainability issues. In this paper, we propose a light-weight and scalable hierarchical-MVC architecture for Web application development in Cloud environment, named Web Module Definition (WMD), which supports feature-based modularization and application structure. In WMD, the entire Web application is decomposed into interconnect WMD modules, which contains controllers and views for a single feature. WMD modules are able to include and extend others to handle complex business logic. In the meantime, we provide a Web application framework implementation supporting WMD-based architecture, and present a demonstration website using WMD.