Webdam Project

Speaker: Prof. Yannis Papakonstantinou, Computer Science and
Engineering, Univ of California at San Diego

When: Friday September 14th, 10:30

Where: ENS Cachan http://www.ens-cachan.fr/
amphithéâtre 121, Léonard de Vinci building

Title: Declarative, optimizable data-driven specifications of web &
mobile applications

Abstract:
Developers of web and mobile application development write too much
low level “plumbing” code to efficiently access, integrate and
coordinate application state that resides on multiple sub-systems of
the architecture, and is accessed using different languages: SQL at
the database server; HTML and Javascript at the browser, which in
HTML5 includes its own database state; Java or other programming
languages at the application server.

In the spirit of Active XML, the FORWARD project replaces such low level
code with declarative specifications. Its cornerstones are
(i) the unified application state virtual database, which enables
modeling and manipulating the entire application state in an extension
of SQL, named SQL++
(ii) specification of Ajax pages as essentially rendered views over
the unified application state.

We discuss problems solved in the last three years and the system
resulting from this activity. We then discuss a cluster of issues resulting
from both mobile agents and demanding Big Data visualizations and
propose a recently-initiated effort on an asynchronous SQL.

Consequently the following three problems are resolved by appropriate
reduction to data management problems, where prior database research
literature is leveraged and extended.

1. The partial change of Ajax pages, in response to application state
changes, is reduced to an incremental view maintenance problem. Id’s
that retain the provenance of the page data play an instrumental
efficiency role.

2. Efficient data access is reduced to semistructured query processing
over an integrated view that involves large database(s) and small main
memory-based sources. We connect with prior works in OQL.

3. The inherent location transparency of the specifications is
exploited in order to perform computation at the appropriate location
(browser vs server). More broadly, the talk discusses ongoing and
future work in utilizing the increased abilities of HTML5 clients
towards achieving low latency mobile web applications applications,
while location transparency of the specifications is retained.

Short Bio:
Yannis Papakonstantinou (http://db.ucsd.edu/people/yannis.htm) is a
Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of
California, San Diego. His research is in the intersection of data
management technologies and the web, where he has published over
eighty research articles. He has given multiple tutorials and invited
talks, has served on journal editorial boards and has chaired and
participated in program committees for many international conferences
and workshops.

Yannis enjoys to commercialize his research and to inform his research
accordingly. He was the CEO and Chief Scientist of Enosys Software,
which built and commercialized an early XML-based Enterprise
Information Integration platform. Enosys Software was acquired in 2003
by BEA Systems. His lab’s FORWARD platform (for the rapid development
of data-driven Ajax applications) is now in use by many commercial
applications. He is involved in data analytics in the pharmaceutical
industry and is in the technical advisory board of Brightscope Inc.

Yannis holds a Diploma of Electrical Engineering from the National
Technical University of Athens, MS and Ph.D. in Computer Science from
Stanford University (1997) and an NSF CAREER award for his work on
data integration.

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