HyperStorM

Abstract

It is a well-known problem that developers of hypermedia applications need assistance for modeling and maintaining application-specific hypermedia structures. In the past, various hypermedia engines have been proposed to support these tasks. Until now, hypermedia engines either provided a fixed hypermedia data model and left extensions to the hypermedia application or they left the modeling of the hypermedia data completely to the application developer and only provided storage functionality which had to be plugged into the data model by the application developer. As an alternative, we propose an extensible object-oriented hypermedia engine which supports the specification of application semantics as application classes within the hypermedia engine, thereby supporting complex operations maintaining application-specific as well as application-independent constraints. In the HyperStorM hypermedia engine, the storage layer and the application layer of a hypermedia system are implemented within the object-oriented database management system VODAK. Only the presentation layer is kept outside the OODBMS. This approach facilitates both the reuse of database functionality as well as the flexibility necessary to support the efficient development of different kinds of hypermedia applications. First evaluations show that our approach presents a much more powerful hypermedia engine than previous approaches, thus giving a new quality to hypermedia application development.

Evaluation of hypermedia application development and management systems

“…Thus, they are not able to produce applications for various hypermedia systems, from the same content. We evaluated two OHSs: HyperStorM [1] and HyperDisco [28]. The latter is an example of an OHS that is based on an HBMS and is the successor prototype of the Hyperform [27] hypermedia system development environment.…”

“…HyperStorM [1]. HyperStorM proposes an extensible OO hypermedia system, which supports the specification of application semantics as application classes within the hypermedia system, thereby supporting complex operations maintaining application-specific as well as applicationindependent constraints.…”

“…More specifically, we classify the users as end-users and application developers (designers, implementers and authors / administrators). The specific needs of these users combined with our own practical experience on developing hypermedia applications, "The Dexter hypertext reference model [10]" and the work of Garzotto F. et al [8], Bieber M. et al [3] and Bapat A. et al [1] led to the selection of the evaluation criteria.…”