A%20Framework%20for%20Automatic%20Web%20Application%20Generation

1
A Framework for Automatic Web Application
Generation

• Marc Battyani - Fractal Concept

2
Evolution of Web Applications

• Static documents
• Simple applications
• Search engines
• eCommerce
• General applications

3
First Gen Web Apps Tools

• HTML/DHTML
• WYSIWYG editors
• Powerful general purpose editors
• CGI interface
• Perl

4
Second Gen Web Apps Tools

• Server side script languages
• ASP
• PHP
• Perl
• Python
• Etc.

5
Current Gen Web Apps Tools

• .NET
• J2EE

6
Next Gen Web Apps Tools

• Common Lisp

7
Restricting The Problem Domain

• Corporate acceptability
• Data centric
• Partitionable concurrency model

8
Engineering Constraints

• Data Integrity
• UI Views Generation
• View Coherence
• Application Navigation
• Flexibility
• Portability
• Performance and Scalability

9
Why Common Lisp?

• Performance
• Stability
• Excellent macro system
• Most powerful object system
• Lexical closures
• Dynamic code generation and compilation
• Debugging and dynamic modification of a running
  system
• Resilience to changes

10
General Architecture

• HTTP Front-End
• Application Server
• Database
• Sexpr
• SQL

11
Object Class Descriptions Slots added to Meta
Class

• GUID
• Instanciable
• user-name
• sql-name
• Description
• Version
• direct-views
• direct-functions
• direct-rules
• And a few more..

12
Object Class Descriptions Slots added to slot
definitions

• user-name
• sql-name
• Description
• value-type
• list-of-values
• Unique
• Stored
• Indexed
• null-allowed
• Unit
• read-only-groups
• hidden-groups
• disable-predicate
• void-link-text
• view-type
• And a few more.

13
Session and State Management

• URI encoded property lists
• Session objects
• SSL session id
• Robot session id

14
UI Management

• Navigation
• Pull mode
• Push mode
• HTML Generation
• LHTML representation
• Views
• Using remote scripting
• Automatically generated
• Semi-automatically generated

15
Documents Generation

• cl-pdf
• cl-typesetting
• cl-typegraph

16
The Meta Application

• The first application written with the framework
  has been the framework application itself.

17
Web Services

• Basic XML-RPC support
• SOAP support in the future if needed

18
Current state

• Full production use since 2002
• Real complex applications are being done with it.
• 100 increase of the user base

19
Applications

• A network infrastructure management workflow and
  repository for a bank.
• A network stats and maps generation software for
  a bank.
• Traceability software for the blood and
  biological supply chain.
• Benefits management software.

20
Conclusion

• One order of magnitude in productivity over
  alternatives
• Still unmatched functionalities
• Much better result quality and usability than the
  existing alternatives. (99.98 uptime last week)
• The choice of Common Lisp has been comforted by
  the result. The full framework has less than 20K
  lines of code and it already has functionalities
  without equivalent in other frameworks. This
  compares rather well to the 0.6 to several
  millions of lines of code of the J2EE and .NET
  frameworks.