Towards Persistence Framework-Based Rapid Application Development Toolkit for Web Application Development

Software systems must be delivered quickly in order to respond to today's rapid changing business environments. Persistence framework was introduced to overcome the problem of object-relational impedance mismatch, occurred in most enterprise applications that need access to a relational database. However, most of these persistence frameworks are difficult to configure and use, thus do not really contribute much to the improvement of software developers' overall productivity. This study proposes the concept, architecture, design and development of a rapid application development toolkit that will leverage on a persistence framework to subsequently provide an easy-to-use and customizable front-end web application development environment for developers to perform rapid web application development. Unlike prior efforts, the combination of the features of rapid prototyping, code generation and configuration wizard on top of the persistence framework provided by the proposed rapid application development toolkit enables developers not only to deliver their target web applications within a shorter timeframe through an easy-to-use front-end environment, but also to achieve encapsulation of database access from the business objects of a web application.