Project type: CONSULTING
Web site: http://istlab.dmst.aueb.gr/
Starting date: 2004-01-16
Ending date: 2004-04-01

The Web site project aims to create a dynamic, distributed, and maintanable Web site for ISTLab.
Traditionally, the realization of Web sites involves either static content developed using web authoring tools like Microsoft's Front Page and DreamWeaver, or dynamic content delivered by a database driven front-end, where the structured content is organized in a relational schema and dynamically generated on the fly. When our group faced the successive failure of both the above approaches, we decided to adopt the task of exploring ideas for a radically different implementation style, based on the declarative specification of all the site's elements. We believe that our approach and many of the lessons we learned can be applied numerous similar situations, leading to a lightweight, structured, consistent, and maintainable web site building method.
The guiding principles behind our design are:

• Openness
• Observability
• Robustness
• Parsimony