In addition to their inherent multifaceted functionality, these Web applications exhibit complex behavior and place some unique demands on their usability, performance, security and ability to grow and evolve.
Proponents of web engineering supported the establishment of web engineering as a discipline at an early stage of web. First Workshop on Web Engineering was held in conjunction with World Wide Web Conference held in Brisbane, Australia, in 1998. San Murugesan, Yogesh Deshpande, Steve Hansen and Athula Ginige, from University of Western Sydney, Australia formally promoted web engineering a new discipline in the first ICSE workshop on Web Engineering in 1999. Since then they published a serial of papers in a number of journals, conferences and magazines to promote their view and got wide support. Major arguments for web engineering as a new discipline are:
- WIS (Web Information System) and WIS development process are different and unique.
- Web engineering is multi-disciplinary; no single discipline (such as software engineering) can provide complete theory basis, body of knowledge and practices to guide WIS development.
- Issues of evolution and lifecycle management when compared to more 'traditional' applications.
- Web based information systems and applications are pervasive and non-trivial. The prospect of web as a platform will continue to grow and it is worth being treated specifically.
