Catching the Boat with Strudel:
Experiences with a Web-Site Management System
Mary Fernandez (AT&T Labs)
Daniela Florescu (Inria Roquencourt)
Jaewoo Kang (Savera Systems)
Alon Levy (Univ. of Washington)
Dan Suciu (AT&T Labs)
The Strudel system applies concepts from database
management systems to the process of building Web sites.
Strudel's key idea is separating
the management of the site's data,
the creation and management of the site's structure,
and the visual presentation of the site's pages.
First, the site builder creates a
uniform model of all data available at the site.
Second, the builder
uses this model to declaratively define
the Web site's structure by
applying a ``site-definition query''
to the underlying data.
The result of evaluating this query is a ``site graph'',
which represents both the site's content and structure.
Third, the builder
specifies the visual presentation of pages in
Strudel's HTML-template language.
The data model underlying Strudel is a
semi-structured model of labeled directed graphs.
We describe Strudel's key characteristics,
report on our experiences using Strudel,
and present the technical problems that arose
from our experience.
We describe our experience
constructing several Web sites with Strudel and discuss the impact of
potential users' requirements on Strudel's design. We address several
questions: (1) when does a declarative specification of site
structure provide significant benefits, and (2) what are the main
advantages provided by the semi-structured data model.