III: Small: Do-It-Yourself forms-driven workflow web applications

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

Emerging Do-It-Yourself database-driven web application projoect aims to (1) enable non-programmers to rapidly build custom data management and workflow applications and (2) to promote a novel pattern of interaction between application owners and programmers. Their beneficiaries are organizations, in need of long tail web applications, that cannot afford the time and money needed to engage into the conventional code development process. Do-It-Yourself platforms must maximize two metrics that present an inherent trade-off: the simplicity of specification and the application scope, which characterizes the class of applications that can be built using the platform?s specification mechanism. The proposal introduces two scopes with interesting trade-off features. Namely, in the "All-SQL" scope and the (more limited) "forms-driven workflows" scope each application page consists of a report (modeled by a nested query) and forms and actions in the report's context, leading to updates. The limitations have practically minor effects on the scope but they enable simple specification and automatic optimizations, studied in the proposal, such as: 1. automatic creation of reports by choosing between the candidates using information theoretic criteria relying on constraints captured in the limited models. 2. summarization of applications as workflow specifications by analyzing the dependencies between updates and queries. Vice versa, the proposal shows how simple workflow primitives translate to queries (reports) and updates (forms and actions). The proposal also provides an unlimited model of web applications, where programmers introduce code components and interface them with the "limited" part via queries and updates. The proposed models of database-driven web applications will impact the education of both Computer Science (CS) and non-CS students that need to comprehend web applications at a high conceptual level. For further information see the project web page at http://www.db.ucsd.edu/forward