Sharing software tools on the WEB: The IDEA Web Lab

Abstract

With the spreading of the World Wide WEB as a uniform and ubiquitous interface to computer applications and information, novel opportunities are offered for introducing significant changes in all organizations and their processes. This paper describes the IDEA Web Laboratory (Web Lab), a WEB-based software design environment available on Internet, which demonstrates a novel approach to the software production process on the WEB.

The IDEA Methodology is a novel proposal for designing database applications taking advantage of the most advanced features of modern database technology, especially objects and rules. The IDEA development process proceeds through the steps of analysis, design, prototyping and implementation. All these activities are supported, although to a variable degree, by the CASE tools collected in the Web Lab. Users can register to the Lab and develop their applications in a protected workspace, from requirements to the generation of code for the Oracle relational DBMS.

A number of other resources can be accessed from within the Web Lab for assisting the learning process of the methodology, including the documentation of selected applications developed by the industrial partners of the IDEA project, an on-line tutorial of the methodology, technical and user's manuals, and downloadable software tools.

Research presented in this paper is supported by Esprit project P6333 IDEA