Declarative specification of Web sites with STRUDEL

STRUDEL is a system for implementing data-intensive Web sites, which typica lly integrate information from multiple data sources and have complex struc ture. STRUDEL'S key idea is separating the management of a Web site's data, the specification of its content and structure, and the visual representat ion of its pages. STRUDEL provides a declarative query language for specify ing a site's content and structure, and a simple template language for spec ifying a site's HTML representation. This paper contains a comprehensive de scription of the STRUDEL system and details the benefits of declarative sit e specification. We describe our experiences using STRUDEL in a production application and describe three different, but complementary, systems that e xtend and improve upon STRUDEL's original ideas.