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Self-maintaining Web Pages

Project duration
January 2000 - January 2003
Short description
Data-intensive web-based information systems usually employ database systems to store the contents forming the basis for web page construction. Generating web pages on the fly, especially in peak times, can lead to severe performance problems. Thus, pre-generation of web pages has been suggested to be ready for prime time, allowing to reliably deliver several hundred pre-generated pages per second. Maintaining the consistency of these web pages with respect to changes within the database in an efficient way, however, represents a major challenge. This project introduces a novel approach for "self maintaining" web pages that is, different to previous approaches, characterized by a simple (and thus, easy to maintain) database-to-web page mapping and very low page re-generation costs. This is achieved by utilizing fragmentation techniques from distributed databases, by allocating parameterized fragments to web page classes (rather than individual fragments to single web pages), and using the Extensible Markup Language (XML) as an intermediate layer between the database and the final web pages.
Project team
Michael Schrefl (DKE)
Martin Bernauer (DKE)
Thomas Thalhammer (DKE)
Birgit Pröll
Elisabeth Kapsammer
Werner Retschitzegger
Publications
M. Schrefl, E. Kapsammer, W. Retschitzegger, B. Pröll:
Self-Maintaining Web Pages - An Overview
In: Proceedings of the Twelfth Australasian Database Conference (ADC 2001), Bond University, Queensland, Australia, January 29 - February 1, IEEE Computer Society Press, pp. 83-90, 2001.
M. Schrefl, M. Bernauer, E. Kapsammer, W. Retschitzegger, B. Pröll, T. Thalhammer:
Self-Maintaining Web Pages
In: Information Systems - Databases: Their Creation, Management and Utilization, Vol. 28, No. 8, Dez. 2003, Elsevier Science B.V., ISSN 0306-4379, pp. 1005-1036, 2003.
M. Bernauer, M. Schrefl:
Self-Maintaining Web Pages: from Theory to Practice
In: Journal Data & Knowledge Engineering, Vol. 48, No. 1, January 2004, ISSN 0169-023X, Elsevier Science B.V., pp. 39-73, 2004.
Documentation