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WebRB: A Different Way to Write Web Applications
DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MIC.2008.69May/June 2008 (vol. 12 no. 3) pp. 52-61
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Avraham Leff, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
James T. Rayfield, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Relational Blocks (RBLOCKS) is a visual dataflow language for writing multipage interactive applications that access relational data, transform relational data, and display relational data in a GUI. WebRB is an implementation of RBLOCKS for a Web-application environment. WebRB is deployed as a software service: developers run the WebRB visual editor in a standard Firefox Web browser and store their page designs and data on the WebRB server. Applications are deployed on a server that interprets visual page designs as Web pages and manages the application's inter-page navigation and associated data-flows. WebRB is a different way to write Web applications because of the use of visual page designs, the lack of imperative code, and use of relational semantics.

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Index Terms:
relational blocks, web relational blocks, programming web applications, visual programming languages, declarative programming, relational algebra, relational model, software as a service
Citation:
Avraham Leff, James T. Rayfield, "WebRB: A Different Way to Write Web Applications," IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 52-61, May/June 2008, doi:10.1109/MIC.2008.69
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