Reusable Navigation Templates to Support Navigation Design in Hera

Reuse is a fundamental concept in software design. It has many aspects and can be applied at various levels of abstraction. In this paper we focus on the reuse of highlevel (design model) specifications of software components in the design of web applications. Concretely, we discuss the reuse of navigation templates to specify (parts of) navigation models in different application domains based on different data sources. While supporting this diversity of applications, at the same time navigation templates should allow easy deployment. In this paper we propose a solution to this apparent contradiction using a component-specific conceptual model. By applying a mapping from this model to a concrete domain model, an automatic deployment of the navigation templates can be performed. The process of navigation template design and deployment (including the process of defining the mapping) is explained and demonstrated on two examples using the Hera framework and its HPG software.