Rapid development of Web applications by introducing database systems with Web APIs

Abstract

Web APIs are offered in many Web sites for Ajax and mashup, but they have been developed independently since there is no reusable database component matched to Web applications. In this paper, we propose WapDB, a novel database management system for rapid development of Web applications. WapDB is designed on Atom, a set of Web API standards, and provides several features required for Web applications, including efficient access control, an easy extension mechanism, and search and statistics capabilities. By introducing WapDB, developers are freed from the need to implement these features as well as Web API processing. In addition, the design totally follows the REST architectural style, which gives uniformity and scalability to applications. We develop a proof-of-concept application with WapDB, and find that it offers great cost effectiveness with no significant impact on performance; in our experiments, the development cost is reduced to less than half with the overhead (in use) of just a few msec in response times. WapDB is being used to develop new services in NTT Communications. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.