III: Small: Database-driven Ajax applications

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

AJAX programming enables superior performance and interface quality that is comparable to desktop applications, despite the fact that the users? browsers interact with a remote server on the cloud. The challenge is that AJAX programs are hard to write since they are essentially distributed programs combining three different languages: browser-side Javascript, a server side programming language (e.g., Java, PHP, etc) and database access with SQL. The proposal develops a framework for the rapid creation of fully-fledged AJAX-based web application pages from declarative, data-driven, SQL-based specifications. The proposal delivers an architecture and SQL-based page specification language that is sufficiently abstract and declarative to enable rapid development, while it is also (a) performant and (b) enables the same class of data-driven web applications with what can be manually coded. Novel incremental view maintenance, distributed query processing and concurrency control techniques enable performance, while the component-based structuring of pages blends the data aspects of the language with front-end mechanisms for creating rich interfaces. Declarative specifications lead to rapid programming, fewer bugs and easy application maintenance and evolution, while the framework solves performance optimization and correctness problems and provides functionalities that otherwise the developer would need to take care of with tedious custom AJAX code. The results are carried over besides Ajax to Adobe's Flash, the recent Microsoft's Silverlight and the emerging mobile application platforms. Furthermore, they contribute to UCSD?s web application development curriculum by providing a principled method of architecting and implementing interactive data-driven applications. The information about the project can be found at http://db.ucsd.edu/NSF10FWD/