infonet-economy

Designing and building a Web site aimed to interact with a database can be a demanding task. A way to accelerate this task is to use a declarative language for specifying hypertext views on databases. In this paper, we discuss hypertext concepts for viewing and acting on a database. While viewing a database through a hypertext view enables a user to navigate among interconnected objects, acting on a database consists mainly in finding objects and associating them (either directly or through the execution of a method). Thus, to act on a database from a hypertext view one must be able to link (or unlink) hypertext nodes and to propagate these operations down to the database. We are currently implementing these concepts in the LAZY system.