Using finite state machines as design and engineering model for database backed Web applications

While databases store information and the Web is the place for the gathering and distribution of information, there are inherent difficulties in linking them together. Often proprietary methods are used which compromise Web compatibility. This paper presents a new design and engineering model using hyperlinks for sophisticated user interaction with relational databases. The finite state machine model well known from static hyper-linked documents is remodelled to be suitable for dynamically generated hyper-links. The actual implementation of such a system is composed of several parts with potentially different techniques. The usability of Java is compared with the HTML approach. A Web based toolset has been implemented to generate the different applications thereby also fostering unlimited Web collaboration. Using this technique, two complete real-life applications have been built. The proposed techniques help to implement stable, robust, flexible, scalable and "Web compliant" applications with complex functionality and to provide new ways to integrate legacy systems.