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Conclusion

Although this project has finished --- it may restart if funding can be found --- we have shown that Web-O-Matic can be used to build a large educational economics application involving many kinds of interdependent interaction. It should be eqully useful in other areas. I would estimate that it was about ten times quicker to develop this application with WOM than it would have been with conventional CGI programming. The IFS was frequently asking for page layouts to be changed, new interactions to be added, and so on: this called for extremely rapid prototyping for which I found WOM invaluable. Once WOM had been written, it took care of all the details of multiple-session handling, file- and session-expiry, maintaining state on the server and inside URLs, and all the other problems Web programmers know and hate.

Object Rexx made prototyping WOM very easy. However, because of worries about future support for the language, I shall be translating WOM into Java.



Jocelyn Ireson-Paine
Fri May 30 14:03:06 BST 1997