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                         DATABASE SEMINAR
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               Prof. Yannis Papakonstantinou 
              Computer Science and Engineering 
               Univ of California at San Diego
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      Declarative, optimizable data-driven specifications 
               of web &  mobile applications
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                Giovedi', 12 settembre, 2013 -- h 10:30
                      **** Aula N3 ****
                   Dipartimento di Ingegneria
                       Universita' Roma Tre
                       Via Vasca Navale, 79
                          piano terra
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                           ABSTRACT
Developers of web and mobile Ajax applications write too much
low level "plumbing" code to efficiently access, integrate and
coordinate application state that resides on the multiple tiers 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.

The FORWARD project replaces such low level programming by providing
to the developer a programming abstraction where the web application
is treated as a single state machine. 
FORWARD's cornerstones are
(i) the unified application state virtual database, which enables
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.

The state machine abstraction replaces manual coding efforts by
system-provided data-related optimizations and automations. 
We summarize such problems solved in the last four years:

1. The partial change of Ajax pages, in response to application state
changes, is reduced to an incremental view maintenance problem for views
with keys.

2. Efficient data access is reduced to distributed & semistructured 
query processing over an integrated view that involves large database(s) 
and small main memory-based sources. 

We then summarize a cluster of issues resulting
from both mobile agents and demanding Big Data visualizations and
propose a recently-initiated effort:

3. The inherent location transparency of the specifications is
exploited in order to automatically perform computation at the appropriate location
(browser vs server) and reducing latency along the way. Interesting
static analysis problems arise in maintaining privacy.

4. An asynchronous version of SQL is suggested.

The FORWARD system has been used in 8 commercial and academic applications. 
Recently a cloud-based version of it became available, which will enable 
developers and IT people to build data-driven applications over their databases
without having to install any additional software.
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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.