skip to main content
article

Webrb: evaluating a visual domain-specific language for building relational web-applications

Published: 21 October 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Many web-applications can be characterized as "relational". In this paper we introduce and evaluate WebRB, a visualdomain-specific language for building such applications. WebRB addresses the limitations of the conventional "imperative-embedding" approach typically used to build relational web-applications. We describe the WebRB language, present extended examples of its use, and discuss the WebRB visual editor, libraries, and runtime. We then evaluate WebRB by comparing it to alternative approaches, and demonstrate its effectiveness in building relational web-applications.

References

[1]
David McFarland. Dreamweaver MX 2004: The Missing Manual. O'Reilly Media, 2003. ISBN: 0596006314.
[2]
IBM Rational Application Developer for Websphere Software Version 6.0. http://www--8.ibm.com/software/includes/pdf/rat app dev LoRes. pdf, 2006. Publication number GC34-2464-00.
[3]
Ruby on rails. http://www.rubyonrails.org/, 2007.
[4]
C. J. Date and Hugh Darwen. A Guide to SQL Standard. Addison-Wesley, 4rth edition, 1996. ISBN: 0201964260.
[5]
Wikipedia. Event loop. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Event loop&oldid=89348024, 2006.
[6]
C. J. Date and H. Darwen. Databases, Types and the Relational Model (3rd Edition). Addison-Wesley, Boston, MA, 2006.
[7]
Peter Van Roy and Seif Haridi. Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 2004.
[8]
Antony J. T. Davie. Introduction to Functional Programming Systems Using Haskell. Cambridge University Press, 1992.
[9]
J. Gray and A. Reuter. Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA, USA, 1993.
[10]
Brian T. Bennett, Bill Hahm, Avraham Leff, Thomas A. Mikalsen, Kevin Rasmus, James T. Rayfield, and Isabelle Rouvellou. A Distributed Object Oriented Framework to Offer Transactional Support for Long Running Business Processes. In ACM Middleware, pages 331--348, 2000.
[11]
Wayne Citrin, Michael Doherty, and Benjamin Zorn. Formal semantics of control in a completely visual programming language. Proc. Symposium on Visual Languages, pages 208--215, 1994.
[12]
P. T. Cox, F. R. Giles, and T. Pietrzykowski. Prograph: a step towards liberating programming from textual conditioning. IEEE Workshop on Visual Languages, pages 150--156, 1989.
[13]
M. M. Burnett and A. L. Ambler. A declarative approach to event-handling in visual programming languages. Proc. IEEE Workshop on Visual Languages, pages 34--40, 1992.
[14]
James Duncan Davidson. Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, Second Edition. O'Reilly, Sebastopol, CA, USA, 2002.
[15]
JavaServer Faces Technology. http://java.sun.com/javaee/javaserverfaces/, 2007.
[16]
MyEclipseIDE. http://www.myeclipseide.com/, 2007.
[17]
M. M. Zloof. Query-by-example: a data base language. IBM Systems Journal, 16(4), 1977.
[18]
Tiziana Catarci, Maria F. Costabile, Stefano Levialdi, and Carlo Batini. Visual query systems for databases: A survey. Journal of Visual Languages & Computing, 8(2), April 1997.
[19]
Database design studio. http://www.dds--pro.com/products/main.html, 2006.
[20]
Relational Persistence for Java and .NET. http://www.hibernate.org/, 2007.
[21]
Enterprise Javabeans Technology. http://java.sun.com/products/ejb/, 2007.
[22]
IBM alphaWorks Services: Web Relational Blocks. http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/webrb/, 2006.
[23]
M. M Burnett, M. J. Baker, C. Bohus, P. Carlson, S. Yang, and P. Van Zee. Scaling up visual programming languages. Computer, 28:45--54, March 1995.
[24]
T. R. G. Green and M. Petre. Usability analysis of visual programming environments: a'cognitive dimensions' framework. J. Visual Languages and Computing, 7(2):131--174, 1996.
[25]
S. Yemini and D. Berry. A modular verifiable exception handling mechanism. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), 1985.
[26]
Thomas Green and Alan Blackwell. Cognitive dimensions of information artefacts: a tutorial. http://www.cl.cam.ac. uk ~afb21/CognitiveDimensions/CDtutorial.pdf, October 1998.
[27]
Smarty: Template engine. http://smarty.php.net/, 2007.
[28]
Eclipse Project. http://www.eclipse.org/eclipse, 2006.
[29]
Frederick P. Brooks. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, 20th Anniversary Edition. Addison-Wesley Professional, 1995.
[30]
Justin Gehtland, Dion Almaer, and Ben Galbraith. Pragmatic Ajax: A Web 2.0 Primer. Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2006.

Cited By

View all
  • (2014)Novel Web Application Development Platform Using Declarative Programming and Business ProcessProceedings of the 2014 Second International Symposium on Computing and Networking10.1109/CANDAR.2014.24(231-237)Online publication date: 10-Dec-2014
  • (2011)Controlled dataflow visual programming languagesProceedings of the 2011 Visual Information Communication - International Symposium10.1145/2016656.2016665(1-10)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2011
  • (2010)Measuring the effort for creating and using domain-specific modelsProceedings of the 10th Workshop on Domain-Specific Modeling10.1145/2060329.2060360(1-6)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2010
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 42, Issue 10
Proceedings of the 2007 OOPSLA conference
October 2007
686 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1297105
Issue’s Table of Contents
  • cover image ACM Conferences
    OOPSLA '07: Proceedings of the 22nd annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications
    October 2007
    728 pages
    ISBN:9781595937865
    DOI:10.1145/1297027
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 October 2007
Published in SIGPLAN Volume 42, Issue 10

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. data-flow languages
  2. relational web-applications
  3. visual programming languages
  4. web relational blocks
  5. web-application development
  6. webrb

Qualifiers

  • Article

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)4
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 07 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2014)Novel Web Application Development Platform Using Declarative Programming and Business ProcessProceedings of the 2014 Second International Symposium on Computing and Networking10.1109/CANDAR.2014.24(231-237)Online publication date: 10-Dec-2014
  • (2011)Controlled dataflow visual programming languagesProceedings of the 2011 Visual Information Communication - International Symposium10.1145/2016656.2016665(1-10)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2011
  • (2010)Measuring the effort for creating and using domain-specific modelsProceedings of the 10th Workshop on Domain-Specific Modeling10.1145/2060329.2060360(1-6)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2010
  • (2009)Instant multi-tier web applications without tearsProceedings of the 2nd India software engineering conference10.1145/1506216.1506219(3-12)Online publication date: 23-Feb-2009
  • (2008)WebRBIEEE Internet Computing10.1109/MIC.2008.6912:3(52-61)Online publication date: 1-May-2008
  • (2007)Relational BlocksProceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing10.1109/VLHCC.2007.45(205-208)Online publication date: 23-Sep-2007
  • (2007)Broadening the Audience for Computational ThinkingProceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing10.1109/VLHCC.2007.11Online publication date: 23-Sep-2007

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media