Bringing Life into Self-Maintaining Web Pages

The Self-Maintaining Web Pages (SMWP) approach employs concepts from distributed database design and active databases to keep pre-generated web pages in synchronization with database content. It maps fragments of relations to web pages and propagates modifications of relations incrementally to web pages. This paper shows how the SMWP approach can be put into practice using off-the-shelf relational database technology. It presents a declarative language for the definition of parameterized fragments and web pages, shows how fragments are stored, and describes how previously presented algorithms for propagating modifications of relations to web pages can be realized by database triggers. Key words: Active Databases, E-Commerce, Web Applications/XML, Replication, Caching, and Views