Building Persistent Application Systems in Fully Integrated Data Environments: Modularization, Abstraction and Interoperability

Research and development in the FIDE project on Fully Integrated Data Environments has led to the concept of Persistent Object Systems (POS) which generalize database systems by re-interpreting schemas as type definitions and databases as typed variables in addition to treating lifetime as a type-independent property. Furthermore, FIDE develops uniform linguistic interfaces for data modelling, computation and communication, and extends database, programming and communication technology to enable integrated application development based on interoperating POSs.As a consequence of such an integrated view, formerly disjoint concepts such as databases, program and module libraries, files or repositories can now be treated uniformly as POSs differentiated essentially by the types of objects they contain and by the operational abstractions they provide.Based on state-of-the-art database technology, this paper outlines FIDE results in extending databases and providing the integrated technology considered necessary for the construction and maintenance of Persistent Application Systems. Since our main goal is to improve substantially a system’s capability of persisting successfully over time in changing environments, particular emphasis will be placed on systems scalability and its consequences for POS interoperability.