DELOS: Development Environment Located Over SIS

Computer community's view of applications has changed in several manners over the years. While applications were isolated in early 80's, they became networked after '85 so that we ended to web-paged applications nowadays. Along with every social change, applications' interaction with data evolved. The latter were initially saved in file systems or in hierarchical databases during the 80's. The development of relational databases enabled the fast and effective access of voluminous data. The applications' complexity during the last years, forced the employment of the Object Oriented approach in application development, while on the same time the development of the OODBs enabled the transformation of application modules to objects that may reside in the OODBs and are integrated with the data. All the above explains the fact that the integration of www and OO technology has been widely accepted by the software development groups. The advantages seem to be obvious since a plethora of different needs are thought to be accommodated that way: a huge and easily approached www application base is starving for real applications; the around the world digital libraries are waiting to be exploited; customized, localized applications are on demand; web applications' development time is vital; the reuse of software objects is essential. In the meanwhile, a new key player in the space of www OO application development appears: Java (http://www.javasoft.com/aboutJava/index.html) is the new native OO language providing a set of unique features, like platform neutral binary code, dynamic loaded classes, remote method invocation etc., that altogether establish it as the prime language for www-OO applications. Unfortunately, the majority of the current development environments do not exploit the power of Java or they just treat it as a new C++, by producing alternatively to C++ code, the equivalent java code ( ND ELEMENTS ENVIRONMENT (http://www.neurondata.com), Symantech CAFE (http://cafe.symantec.com/cafe/overview.htm) ).