Ideas for the future

The program faster, more efficiently, faultless and more functionally is onw th^ing. The other is to be realized it really new ideas. Xdobry could serve as a basis for the development of different DB-applications. This is made possible by the developing it as an open system and the use of XML as an interface. On the basis of the system other DB-applications could be developed such as diagram-viewer, report-generator, db-developing-tools, ER-diagram editor. Without big expenditure the SchemaEditor can be converted in tools for the administration the Data Dictionary. Then the complete relational schema could be developed first in the SchemaEditor and be sent later as SQL-instructions to the RDBMS. For the practical work with the system the possibility of the additional adaptation the schema would be very important. In the ideal case the system should recognize the changes by the schema automatically and transmit to the Repository and other DB-applications.

One could place the development of the DB-applications in general relation to Repository-systems. Promisingly the standardization is the object management Group (OMG), also confesses from the standardization of the oriented to object-DBMS and CORBA (Common Object Request broker). A standard was compiled for the access to Meta-data (Meta-object MOF Facility). The Meta-data are described with the help of the UML-language. These descriptions can be filed as XML-documents (XMI XML Metadat Interchange). The forms could not access the relational schema special on CORBA-objects, this would be a development in the direction object-oreinted-databasess.

As the smallest denominator for relational databasess standard SQL-92 and mysql was chosen. Many of the problems were solved in SQL99 standard. It remains for the moment to wait to the available RDBMS support this standard. Interesting the implementing of object-relational qualities of the popular databases Postgres could be. Many of those cover themselves with standard SQL3.

  1. Array attributes

  2. Tupel can be identified by OID (Objectidentifier)

  3. Versioning

  4. databases-rule

2 interesting projects also exist to the description of the GUI interface as XML-documents. One comes of it as a by-product of the development of Open Source Netscape (Mozilla). It is XPToolkit (http://www.mozilla.org/xpfe ), the user's interface can independent of platform as XML-documents (user's interface XUL XMl Language). Another project comes with the editor for the development of GUIs GLADEhttp://glade.pn.org. It is a part of the GNOME project, free desktop Enivronment for LINUX. The idea with both projects is that the appearance of the GUI is not party-coded in the program, but is always present as a XML-document. This could allow a better and flexible configuring of the interface by the used without must to recompile the program. Both projects are all the more valuable that the complete source are free and can be applied the available components also with foreign projects. The development of FormEditor and FormServer could profit from it.

There also exist other interesting colleges of technology which are connected with XML-standard. By the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) the transformation can be automated by XML-documents in other XML-classes or other formats. So one could realize transformation of the Repository in specific SQL-instructions (the type CREATE TABLE) easily.

The main disadvantage the DTD (Document Type Defintion) is no context-systex can be covered. With DTD can not be guaranteed a well-shaped Repository also a valid relational schema represents. The newer developments like XML-schema allow a more exact definition of the document-types and overcoming such disadvantages.

Another direction for the advancement of the system would be the support of other abstractions and semantics in SchemaEditor and afterwards with the form-server. Two cases are conceivable here: 1. the system an interface offers for the addition functions the DBMS like versioning, new data types, DB-rule (Trigger) 2. The system implements even new functional characters like versioning, Authentiefizierung, integrity rule, cascading delete. For the conceptual model the support of other abstractions would be possible: derived attributes, derived relations, dependent relations (e. g. , an assistant can only in the project participant if he the special qualifications has). , representation and manipulation of the tree structures which are filed as tables.