Internet application development using a meta-repository
Michel Tilman (mtilman@acm.org)
Michel Tilman graduated in Mathematics at the Brussels Free University, where he joined the Programming Technology Lab in 1985, doing research on models for concurrent object-oriented systems, on frameworks for groupware applications and configurable application servers, and on pratical applications of reflection. He later applied his experience in commercial settings (SoftCore, Unisys). He has been using Smalltalk for 13 years.
In this demonstration we present an Internet application development framework that provides developers with high-level tools for building and maintaining Web-based applications in a flexible way. The framework is dynamically driven by meta-information stored in a central database. The Internet framework builds on the ARGO framework presented at the ESUG 1999 conference. Using the ARGO framework we define and maintain the business logic by modeling and configuring, rather than through scripting. The Internet application server allows the users to access these applications through the Web. The demonstration is accompanied by a technical overview of the framework architecture.