On the unification of persistent programming and the world-wide web

Abstract

In its infancy, the World-Wide Web consisted of a web of largely static hypertext documents. As time progresses it is evolving into a domain which supports almost arbitrary networked computations. Central to its successful operation is the agreement of the HTML and http standards, which provide inter-node communication via the medium of streamed files. Our hypothesis is that, as application sophistication increases, this file-based interface will present the same limitations to programmers as the use of traditional file and database system interfaces within programming languages. Persistent programming systems were designed to overcome these problems in traditional domains; our investigation is to reapply the resulting research to the new domain of the Web. The result of this should be the ability to pass typed data layered on top of the existing standards, in a manner that is fully integrated with them. A typed object protocol integrated with existing standards would allow the Web to be used to host a global persistent address space, thus making it a potential data repository for a generation of database programming languages.