Appaserver

Appaserver is an open-source, application server used to create multi-user, database applications. It runs on UNIX-flavored operating systems, connecting Oracle or MySQL to a browser.

Appaserver's paradigm is to build database applications without painting or programming the user interface. Instead, applications are assembled from database components — tables, columns, relations, and roles. Web forms are created dynamically, allowing select, insert, update, and delete operations on each table. Also:

  1. Primary keys can be updated. The update then cascades throughout the foreign keys across related tables.
  2. Rows can be deleted without creating orphans. Rows in one-to-many related tables will automatically be deleted unless the relationship is flagged to update the foreign key to null.
  3. Natural keys are used, not Surrogate keys. However, surrogate keys may be used as secondary keys. For example, the primary key for the customer table would likely be "Customer_Name|Address". However, the customer table might also have a customer_number column as a secondary key. Therefore, the primary key for the customer table might be "Customer_Name|Customer_Number".

Security is obtained by grouping users into roles. Table-level access — select, insert, update, and delete — is then granted to each role. Security can be refined by restricting row-level and column-level access. Processes are executed via the Common Gateway Interface. Appaserver is available under the GNU software license.

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