EDS: An Elastic Data-Service for Situational Applications

Developers of situational applications – applications created by a small group of users/developers to satisfy the specific needs of the group – require two things from their software stack. First, they require support for their rapidly changing designs; second, they require semantics that are close to their own domain of expertise. For example, developers of situational applications prefer to use scripting languages because the "duck typing" style of programming language allows them to ignore issues related to class inheritance or interface implementation. In comparison to strongly-typed languages, developers can begin programming more quickly, and can modify their program more rapidly in response to changing requirements. In this paper we explore whether middleware services can similarly provide developers of situational applications with these desired software characteristics. Specifically, we present EDS, an Extensible Data-Service designed to support applications whose design changes rapidly and with semantics that are closer to the domain expertise of situational application developers. We present the features of EDS, contrast it to other data services and APIs, and discuss the EDS implementation.