WebStore: An Integrated Approach to Static Safety of Web Applications

Dr. David Munro (University of Adelaide)

DCS SEMINAR SERIES

DATE: 2003-04-11
TIME: 14:00:00 - 15:00:00
LOCATION: Room N101, CSIT Building [108]
CONTACT: JavaScript must be enabled to display this email address.

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.

BIO:
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.