Unifying Interaction with Persistent Data and Program

Abstract

Visual interaction with object-oriented databases, such as that provided by generic object browsing systems, has proved to be a convenient and natural way for database users to address informal queries over the contents of a database. Our particular field of interest is browsing and editing in persistent and database programming languages where procedures are treated as data values, with the consequence that executable code may exist in the same persistent environment as the other data that it manipulates. Such systems include object-oriented database systems, where the objects’ method code is an intrinsic part of the object database itself.

A new style of browsing is introduced which allows a browser/editor to subsume all the activities normally connected with writing queries and other programs against the database. It therefore provides the only interface to the database that programmers and users require to understand. This is achieved partly by unifying the concepts of source and executable code within a system. This unification relies upon the paradigm of hyper-programming, in which programs may contain direct links to database values embedded in their source representations.