A Coding-free Software Framework of Developing Web Data Management Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a coding-free, SaaS-based framework for developing web data management systems, enabling non-programmers to quickly create and deploy customized systems through a universal platform and spreadsheet-based requirements.

Contribution

It presents a novel coding-free construction method and a practical platform that simplifies web data management system development for non-programmers.

Findings

Framework is feasible and effective in real deployment.

Platform enables quick generation of customized systems.

Spreadsheet-based requirements mapping streamlines development.

Abstract

More and more enterprises recently intend to deploy data management systems in the cloud. Due to the professionalism of software development, it has still been difficult for non-programmers to develop this kind of systems, even a small one. However, the development of SaaS brings forth the more feasibility of coding-free software development than before. Based on the SaaS architecture, this paper presents a set of theory and method for coding-free construction of a data management system, on which our contributions involve in a practical application platform, a set of construction method and a set of interface on data exchange. By abstracting the common features of data management systems, we design a universal web platform to quickly generate and publish customized system instances. Moreover, we propose a kind of method to develop a data management system using a specific requirements table in spreadsheet. The corresponding platform maps the requirements table into a system instance through parsing the table model and implementing the objective system in the running stage. Finally, we implement the proposed framework and deploy it on web. The empirical result demonstrates the feasibility and availability of the coding-free method in developing web data management systems.