Haystack Blog

This is a nice talk by Kian Win Ong of UCSD called “Do It Yourself custom forms-driven workflow applications.”   They’re looking at all the work people invest building special purpose content management systems that really offer users little more than “CRUD” (create, read, update delete) interactins for certain specialized kinds of content.

The basic approach is for the owner to manipulate the visible parts of the system—the forms that people use to enter data, and the pages that show the data in the system—and for the server to automatically create the schemas and databases needed to support those interfaces.  For example, if the owner adds a field in the form, the backend will add a field in the back-end database, without the owner knowing anything about that database.  This class of tools are known as “forms driven applications”.

The main contribution here is that an important part is to manage “workflows”—they way content is entered and then flows through various stages of the system, evolving and changing who can and should see it as it goes.   There needs to be a notion of roles and access permissions, and for pages to behave differently depending on both the state of the data and who is accessing the page.   It’s hard to do this if you only work with one page/form at a time.  Their tool tries to provide “guided debugging” of the entire workflow, suggesting the next steps that should happen to a particular piece of data, data it should be combined with, and roles it should be assigned to.

These ideas have been pushed into a startup called app2you.  I quite like the approach and hope it is successful.