Graphics Programming Using a Database System with Dependency Declarations

Abstract

This paper presents and integrates two ideas which can have a long-term impact on the ease of developing interactive computer graphics applications. The first idea is that of using a database management system (DBMS) to manage all the data in an interactive graphics application program (graphical input data, application data, and graphical output data). The second idea is that of replacing much of the traditional procedural specification of an application program with a more concise specification of the dependencies among the input, application, and output data. The underlying system performs the procedures necessary to maintain the dependencies. These two ideas are combined by using a relational DBMS to manage the data, and continuously evaluated qualified updates to specify dependencies to the DBMS. We illustrate these ideas with an example, and discuss the implementation of our system.