Authors:
José Paulo Leal
1
and
Jorge Braz Gonalves
2
Affiliations:
1
University of Porto, Portugal
;
2
Polytechnic Institute of Guarda, Portugal
Keyword(s):
Web application generation, XML transformations, Architectural patterns, Data management applications.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
CASE Tools for System Development
;
Coupling and Integrating Heterogeneous Data Sources
;
Databases and Information Systems Integration
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Modeling Concepts and Information Integration Tools
;
Software Engineering
;
Web Databases
Abstract:
Our research goal is the generation of working web applications from high level specifications. Based on our experience in using XML transformations for that purpose, we applied this approach to the rapid development of database management applications. The result is an architecture that defines of a web application as a set of XML transformations, and generates these transformations using second order transformations from a database schema. We used the Model-View-Controller architectural pattern to assign different roles to transformations, and defined a pipeline of transformations to process an HTTP request. The definition of these transformations is based on a correspondence between data-oriented XML Schema definitions and the Entity-Relationship model. Using this correspondence we were able produce transformations that implement database operations, forms interfaces generators and application controllers, as well as the second order transformations that produce all of them. This
paper includes also a description of a RAD system following this architecture that allowed us to perform a critical evaluation of this proposal.
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