Development, Maintenance, and Operation of Information Systems

In order to build an information system today, it is not enough to attend a Database 101 course and learn SQL, the standard database programming language supported by all commericial relational database products. In addition, engineers must know about Web technologies (XML, XML Schema, SOAP, html, ...), application frameworks (e.g., PHP,J2EE), and an Armada of additional infrastructure components (e.g.,message queues, firewalls). In the last decade, it has not become simpler, but in contrary, much more difficult to write a simple „hello world“ program. For the same reasons, it has become more expensive to maintain and operate an information system or database application.

The goal of this project is to develop new programming and system models for modern Web-based information systems. As a result, programmers can focus on the application logic and need not worry
about different technologies and/or how to make their application performant, secure, or highly available. For instance, the well-known impedance mismatch between XML, Java, and relational dfatabases should disappear and special functionality such as asynchronous messages, event-based programming, logging and error handling should be a native part of a programming language for Web-based information systems. Furthermore, we are currently working on tools (e.g., debuggers) and a platform to operate such Web-based information systems. For this purpose, we exploit ideas from different research communities: database systems, compiler construction, and distributed systems. As a result, we hope to achieve much better performance, higher availability and better management for Web-based information systems.

One particular toolwe are developing as part of this project is a tool in order to carry out regression tests for Web-based information systems. Traditional frameworks for regression tests such as Junit are not applicable because they do not involve testing the user interface and do not work well for database applications that require the management of a test database.