Engineering safe and efficient shareability within Web systems

Abstract

Existing Web application development approaches provide inadequate support for the increasing complexity of modern Web applications. The domain of Web engineering seeks to redress this situation by advocating that systematic solutions replace ad hoc approaches. Our WebStore project applies this principle to provide static safety of Web applications. In this paper, we focus on systemic support for safe sharing, which is widely recognised as critical in the provision of high quality Web content. File-based approaches to sharing are ad hoc and suffer from well known limitations of filesystems. Existing systematic attempts typically utilise a database that is (artificially) separated from the Web server. Whilst this supports safe sharing within the database, support is curtailed at the boundary of separation. Our solution adopts a fully integrated approach that provides system-wide safe shareability, including sharing of dynamic content generators and the Web Server itself. WebStore is a Web application server, implemented entirely within a persistent object store, which delivers safe sharing. WebStore performs comparably to mainstream systems for non-shared content and delivers significantly superior performance for shared content.