Title: Department of Computer Science Seminar
Date:  Friday, 11 April 2003
Time:  2:00 pm to 3:00 pm
Venue: Room N101, CSIT Building [108]


Title:   WebStore: An Integrated Approach to Static Safety of
         Web Applications


Speaker: Dr. David Munro (University of Adelaide)


Abstract:
  Statically ensuring safety properties of Web applications is
  becoming increasingly important as the Web becomes the dominant
  platform for the construction of large, multi-user applications.
  In particular, Web applications should be provided with at least
  the same guarantees of static safety as in preceding development
  paradigms; the current failure to do so leads to Web application
  users being forced to endure failure modes that would never be
  accepted from conventional applications.

  We introduce a categorisation of this problem area into four major
  safety properties. Further, we observe that these properties are
  interrelated, and hence adopt an integrated model for their
  enforcement. Based on this integrated model, we demonstrate an
  approach to Web application safety that is both simpler and more
  powerful than previous, non-integrated, approaches.

  Standard benchmark results comparing our server to existing
  mainstream Web application development platforms demonstrate that
  it performs comparably for static content and is an order of
  magnitude faster for database applications. This talk outlines our
  approach and its implementation through our WebStore application
  server.


Biography:
  Qualifications  B.Sc. (Hons) in Mathematics (Aberdeen) 1979
                  Dip.Ed. (Aberdeen) 1980
                  Post-Graduate Certificate of Secondary Education
                  Teaching (Aberdeen College of Education) 1980
                  Ph.D. (St Andrews) 1994

                  Member of the British Computer Society (M.B.C.S.)
                  Chartered Engineer (C.Eng.)

  Career
    1982 - 1985     University of St Andrews. Computing Officer,
                    Computing Laboratory.
    1985 - 1998     University of St Andrews. Senior Scientific
                    Officer, Computer Science Division of the School
                    of Mathematical & Computational Sciences
    October 1998 -  University of Adelaide. Senior Lecturer,
                    Department of Computer Science

  The primary  focus of my research is distributed and persistent
  systems; with particular areas of interest in object store technology,
  memory management, distributed and object store garbage collection
  and compliant systems architectures.


URL: http://cs.anu.edu.au/lib/seminars/seminars03/dept20030411