Concepts

Netsilon is a Model-Driven Internet application generator. It is based on three sets of description:

• A business model, which describes the application domain business objects and business rules. This business model is represented using UML class diagrams notation.
• A set of HTML files which provides the layout elements and static content for the pages.
• A navigation model, which provides through a graphic notation, the rules that govern the dynamic behavior of the application, as well as the building of the dynamic pages.

Netsilon is not a HTML authoring tool. The design elements are built with conventionnal 3rd party tools, and then imported within the Netsilon project framework.

These three sets of description will be used by Netsilon to generate automatically the complete set of server-side scripts (as well as the database schema) required to execute the web application. The target language and type of database are specified as parameters of the application generation process.

Netsilon can be considered as a model-driven HTML generator, that is building web pages by combining static pages, page fragments, information coming from computation and/or databases, as well as images, animations, javascript or whatever elements a graphic designer may want to embed in the pages.

Data persistence is automated by Netsilon. Business objects are made persistent using the underlying facilities of relational databases (for instance MySQL or Oracle). The object to relational mapping is created the first time the application is generated, and then incrementally updated as changes are applied to the business model.

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