Relational Blocks: Declarative Visual Assembly of Enterprise Applications

Relational Blocks is a visual programming language, editor, and runtime that enables developers to create enterprise applications without adding any non-visual or imperative code. This is possible because the model, controller, and view language primitives use a compatible relational API and have the same visual representation. Unlike many other visual programming languages, Relational Blocks is general-purpose and oriented towards building transactional applications that have significant amounts of business logic which interacts with the application’s view and model. We believe that using Relational Blocks can greatly enhance developer productivity because of the higher levels of abstraction used to develop the application and because the GUI is developed visually. To evaluate this claim, we compare a Relational Blocks version of a non-trivial application to a Java version, and show that the unified approach of Relational Blocks can considerably simplify
application development.

By: Avraham Leff; James T. Rayfield

Published in: RC24014 in 2006

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