Compositional algebra for interactive data access

Abstract

An important issue for the success of a database application is the effectiveness of its interface. Frequently a relevant part of the programming effort is devoted to the generation of interfaces. The visual programming environments reduce only partly this effort, and in particular, things become more complicated when data coming from different sources (different views in the same database or even views from different databases or systems) are to be related and must cooperate in the data navigation and manipulation task. To overcome this problem we present a new database access paradigm based on an algebra on the domain of computational abstractions called “services” which include both dimensions: the data access computation and the user interaction. This means that the interaction is not implemented by using separated constructs as happens for traditional computational models; on the contrary, as the interaction is an integral part of the service paradigm, the user interaction is computed starting from the declarative specification of the data access itself. The combination of services in a service expression through the operators defined by the service algebra makes it possible to generate cooperating user interfaces for complex data navigation and manipulation. Through algebraic properties, which hold both from the data and user interface point of view, the service expressions can be simplified and optimized guaranteeing their initial semantics. The paper shows the application of the service algebra to the relational environment by means of a simple extension to SQL. Finally, the paper describes a tool based on a three tier architecture and on Java technology for developing and distributing services in Web environment. Services and combination of services expressed with the service algebra are automatically translated into Java objects, allowing the rapid development of platform independent data access services.