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New England Database Society sponsored by Netezza Corporation |
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NEDS |
Rapid
development of data-driven Web 2.0 applications
Yannis
Papakonstantinou
University of California at San Diego
Friday, March 11, 2011, 4PM
Volen 101, Brandeis University
(preceded by a wine and cheese reception at 3:00 pm, and followed by dinner at 6:00 pm)
Abstract:
Web and mobile application
development is plagued by frictions in the applications' architecture.
Developers write fundamentally unnecessary "plumbing" code to integrate
and coordinate application state that resides on multiple sub-systems
of the architecture, and is accessed using different languages (very
typically SQL at the database server, HTML & Javascript at the
browser, Java or other programming languages at the application
server). The emergence of Ajax, Flash and Silverlight application pages
has further complicated the coordination of the server state with the
page state, which now also includes powerful stateful Javascript
components such as maps and calendars.
Towards the solution of these problems FORWARD is a declarative,
data-centric web application rapid development framework and app2you is
a Do-It-Yourself application-building environment. The underlying
philosophy is that (very) easy things should be (very) easy, while
difficult things should be possible.
FORWARD's cornerstones are (i) the unified application state virtual
database, which enables modeling the entire application state in an
extension of SQL, named SQL++, (ii) specification of Ajax pages as
essentially rendered views over the unified application state, which
are automatically incrementally maintained in response to application
state changes. Based on these two cornerstones, the developer easily
creates location-transparent, declarative page and program
specifications, that are optimized and evaluated by the FORWARD
interpreter.
app2you goes a step further that FORWARD: It empowers both programmers
and non-programmer business process owners to rapidly and cheaply
specify the page and program configurations by manipulating visible
aspects of it or by responding to straightforward configuration
questions.
A first version of app2you and FORWARD has been commercialized by app2you.com and has delivered on its
premise in forms-based applications and analytics/reports-based
applications.
Yannis Papakonstantinou is a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego and the founder of app2you.com. His research is in the intersection of database and web technologies. Yannis has published over eighty research articles in scientific conferences and journals, given tutorials at major conferences, and served on journal editorial boards and program committees for numerous international conferences and symposiums. In 1998, Yannis received the NSF CAREER award. In 2000 Yannis founded Enosys Software, which built one of the first generally available distributed XQuery processors, along with software for XML-based integration of distributed sources, and was sold in 2003 to BEA Systems. Yannis holds a Diploma of Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens and MS and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University (1997).
Maintained by Olga Papaemmanouil olga AT cs.brandeis.edu