III: Small: Do-It-Yourself forms-driven workflow web applications

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Emerging Do-It-Yourself database-driven web applicationprojoect aims to (1) enable non-programmers to rapidly build customdata management and workflow applications and (2) to promotea novel pattern of interaction between application owners andprogrammers. Their beneficiaries are organizations, in need of long tailweb applications, that cannot afford the time and money needed toengage into the conventional code development process.Do-It-Yourself platforms must maximize two metrics that presentan inherent trade-off: the simplicity of specification and theapplication scope, which characterizes the class of applicationsthat can be built using the platform?s specification mechanism.The proposal introduces two scopes with interesting trade-offfeatures. Namely, in the "All-SQL" scope and the (more limited)"forms-driven workflows" scope each application page consistsof a report (modeled by a nested query) and forms and actions in thereport's context, leading to updates. The limitations have practicallyminor effects on the scope but they enable simple specification andautomatic optimizations, studied in the proposal, such as:1. automatic creation of reports by choosing between the candidatesusing information theoretic criteria relying on constraints captured inthe limited models.2. summarization of applications as workflow specifications byanalyzing the dependencies between updates and queries. Vice versa,the proposal shows how simple workflow primitives translate to queries(reports) and updates (forms and actions).The proposal also provides an unlimited model of web applications,where programmers introduce code components and interface themwith the "limited" part via queries and updates.The proposed models of database-driven web applications will impactthe education of both Computer Science (CS) and non-CS studentsthat need to comprehend web applications at a high conceptual level.For further information see the project web page athttp://www.db.ucsd.edu/forward