Development of an object oriented framework for design and implementation of database powered distributed Web applications with the DEMETER project as a real-life example

We develop an object-oriented framework for generating Internet-distributed database-powered World Wide Web applications. We rely on the proven technology of standard relational databases, but our tools are designed from scratch, aimed especially towards the needs of the Web with low-bandwidth connections. We use a state machine model for the design and implementation of control elements for Web pages with pure HTML. Sufficient complexity within the user interface and powerful database interaction can be achieved without Java, JavaScript or Active-X, even with more than one concurrent session at once. Based on the state machine model, our design language models the application functionality strictly separated from layout and presentation. This approach makes it independent from future changes to HTML, and we can even give an application more than one layout without changing the functional structure, e.g. to satisfy users´ needs. The object-oriented structure of the design tools makes the framework extensible. With this technique, a database-powered Web application has been implemented successfully: a Europe-wide product marketing system for rural areas, which is currently in the pilot phase. This system has been constructed under the DEMETER (Distance Education, MultimEdia Teleservices and tElework for farmeRs) project, funded by the European Commission under the 4th Framework programme TURA (Telematics for Urban and and Rural Areas)