A Coding-Free Software Framework for Developing Lightweight Web Data Management Systems

Increasingly more enterprises are intending to deploy data management systems in the cloud. However, the complexity of software development significantly increases both time and learning costs of data management system development. In this paper, we investigate the coding-free construction of a data management system based on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) architecture, in which a practical application platform and a set of construction methods are proposed. Specifically, by extracting the common features of data management systems, we design a universal web platform to quickly generate and publish customized system instances. Then, we propose a method to develop a lightweight data management system using a specific requirements table in a spreadsheet. The corresponding platform maps the requirements table into a system instance by parsing the table model and implementing the objective system in the running stage. Finally, we implement the proposed framework and deploy it on the web. The empirical results demonstrate the feasibility and availability of the coding-free method for developing lightweight web data management systems.