For any application, it is desirable to have an application synopsis tool that minimizes efficiency lags, and improves developer's productivity by presenting an overview of the application being developed. In this paper, we consider the problem of deriving synopsis of a database-centric application developed using Oracle Application Express (APEX), a rapid application development tool. Specifically, we have developed an Application Synopsis tool that complements Oracle APEX 3.2 views and application reports capability by including i) An Application Page Branching Tree, ii) An Application Schema Object Dependency Viewer, and iii) Application Page-Composition and Page-Schema-Object Reference Charts. Furthermore, the tool links directly with the corresponding APEX application and page summaries thereby allowing seamless use of combined capabilities in analyzing an application. The usability study conducted with three applications, namely, a magazine subscriber management system (an application under development), a tuberculosis treatment management system (an application in use in trial mode), and a configurable patient services accounting system (an application already operational at multiple hospital sites and evolving), demonstrate the benefits of having such a tool.
['Sadhwi Srinivas', 'Abhishek Biswas', 'Jagannathan Srinivasan']
An application synopsis tool for database applications developed using oracle application express