Debasing

Danny Ayers writes...

It seems to me that a very large proportion of today’s user-oriented Web applications could run as CRUD. We’ve already got a fair idea how to separate content from presentation. But the business logic is usually all tangled up in a combination of SQL tables (and maybe triggers etc) and objects/procedures or other relatively hard-coded representation...

A part of the reason that middle layer has tended to grow over time is the mismatch between the logic provided by the database and the real-world data it has to manage (...much of this is to do with the design of SQL databases, not Codd’s model). Another problem is... up-front design of database schema... There isn’t much flexibility for continuous development at the back end, so things get pushed forward. Not very eXtreme.

...replacing the back end relational database with a triplestore, SQL with SPARQL and schemas with ontologies. Bit of RESTful HTTP and XML for the transport, bit of XSLT for the presentation layer (with HTML forms, XForms, XMLHttpRequest, whatever you like). There’s no reason why the whole lot couldn’t be generated from a set of statements, although a bit of PHP template hacking may be needed in the interim…

Yes, this is the old Semantic Web chestnut rewritten for a new generation…or rather, the generation that got quicker results with Dbase years back…