Declarative Ajax Web Applications through SQL++ on a Unified Application State

Implementing even a conceptually simple web application requires an inordinate amount of time. FORWARD addresses three prob-lems that reduce developer productivity: (a) Impedance mismatch across the multiple languages used at different tiers of the appli-cation architecture. (b) Distributed data access across the multiple data sources of the application (SQL database, user input of the browser page, session data in the application server, etc). (c) Asyn-chronous, incremental modification of the pages, as performed by Ajax actions. FORWARD belongs to a novel family of web application frame-works that attack impedance mismatch by offering a single unify-ing language. FORWARD’s language is SQL++, a minimally ex-tended SQL. FORWARD’s architecture is based on two novel cor-nerstones: (a) A Unified Application State (UAS), which is a virtual database over the multiple data sources. The UAS is accessed via distributed SQL++ queries, therefore resolving the distributed data access problem. (b) Declarative page specifications, which treat the data displayed by pages as rendered SQL++ page queries. The re-sulting pages are automatically incrementally modified by FOR-WARD. User input on the page becomes part of the UAS. We show that SQL++ captures the semi-structured nature of web pages and subsumes the data models of two important data sources of the UAS: SQL databases and JavaScript components. We show that simple markup is sufficient for creating Ajax displays and for modeling user input on the page as UAS data sources. Finally, we discuss the page specification syntax and semantics that are needed in order to avoid race conditions and conflicts between the user input and the automated Ajax page modifications. FORWARD has been used in the development of eight commer-cial and academic applications. An alpha-release web-based IDE (itself built in FORWARD) enables development in the cloud.