November 2009 Archives

If you’re familiar with MVC design, or at least with Ruby on Rails, then you’ve heard of CRUD: create, read, update, delete. These are the basic operations that are possible for data. There are various ways to do each of them, but these four are at the heart of any data-driven web application.

The Fabulator is a data-driven web application engine, so it makes sense that it should support the four CRUD operations. Since the database is essentially an RDF model, we need to map CRUD to RDF.

In a post from quite a while back, I talk about eXtensible State Machines, a way to reduce a web application to an XML document. The original implementation was a stand-alone web application environment/framework written in Perl. The web has evolved since that initial work. We now have web 2.0, Ruby on Rails, and content management systems that are easy to extend (e.g., Radiant).