GrassRoots: socially-driven web sites for the masses

Large, socially-driven Web 2.0 sites such as Facebook and Youtube have seen significant growth in popularity [5, 10]. However, strong demand also exists for socially-driven web sites specialized to companies and knowledge domains. Unfortunately, existing tools for building such sites only provide low-level functionality to address recurring search and organization patterns. Further, they require expertise at many levels of the software stack. Therefore, we propose GrassRoots, a declarative language for modeling socially-driven websites and a compiler to automatically generate the code at several layers of the software stack. We provide abstractions for modeling data and relationships, search, page composition, and navigation. Most notably, we propose a graph-based data model that allows designers to both filter and rank search results using structural and value-based primitives. In this paper, we describe the GrassRoots language and show how popular sociallydriven websites can be sp...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SIGCOMM
• Authors: Frank Uyeda, Diwaker Gupta, Amin Vahdat, George Varghese
• Keywords: Communications, SIGCOMM 2009, Socially-driven Web, Software Stack, Web 2.0