Appaserver

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Appaserver
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Appaserver management in a browser.
Developer(s) Appahost
Initial release October 1999 (1999-10)
Written in C
Operating system Unix-like
Type Application Server
License GNU GPL
Website appaserver.org
File:Appaserver Data Flow Diagram (blue).png
A diagram showing Appaserver's inputs and outputs.

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

  • Top/bottom, one-to-many screens are automatically produced.
  • Query screens are automatically produced.
  • Buttons to compute statistics on numeric fields are automatically created.
  • Buttons to create time charts and histograms on numeric fields are automatically created.
  • Relations are maintained from within.
  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.

External links