<p>The development of enterprise web applications is a very complex and multi-part issue where different programming technologies and tools have to be used. Although these specialized technologies and tools are intended to work together, it would be desirable to have a very flexible designing and developing framework where all the information was managed and stored following a predefined Service Driven Architecture which should also provide internationalization (i18n) to web pages for content and presentation. XML technologies and Java based web applications (implemented as a component-based multi-tier application design defined by J2EE) have been selected to put into practice that kind of framework. This paper describes the nature of enterprise web applications, proposes a service-based approach to develop these systems and presents an example where this solution is used to fulfill the internal management needs of a university department.</p>

<p>Barcelona, Spain. September 2004