A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science, School of Advanced Technologies

Thesis (M.Sc.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 1998

As the use of the Internet grows in the computing world, database integration is becoming crucial to organizations. Many organizations are developing systems in order to expand their database accessibility to the Internet environment. However, to develop such a system, there are no existing guidelines that developers can follow. This study proposes a methodology for the development of database-based object oriented applications on the Internet. This methodology is expected to offer a general procedure for developers to easily build applications on the Internet integrating with the organization's databases. The object-oriented, relational database and distributed system principles are incorporated in order to develop the methodology. The study analyzes these concepts and applies them to accomplish the solution. Although it was revealed from the study that some of the object-oriented concepts (i.e. encapsulation) violate the relational model concept of accessing data, the solution is offered in mapping the object-oriented model to relational database model. The proposed methodology covers the entire software development life cycle. It applies the object-oriented modeling to analysis and design and takes benefits of relational database to store the object persistently. Other issues including determination of the system components, database-access methods, security plan, mapping to program code, and test, are also concluded because all of them are necessary for developing such a system. This thesis also takes into account a case study of AIT alumni system in order to validate and illustrate the proposed methodology.