Curated databases have become important sources of information across scientific disciplines, and due to the manual work of experts, often become important reference works. Features such as provenance tracking, archiving, and data citation are widely regarded as important features for curated databases, but implementing such features is challenging, and small database projects often lack the resources to do so. A scientific database application is not just the database itself, but also an ecosystem of web applications to display the data, and applications supporting data curation. Supporting advanced curation features requires changing all of these components, and there is currently no way to provide such capabilities in a reusable way. Cross-tier programming languages have been proposed to simplify the creation of web applications, where developers write an application in a single, uniform language. Consequently, database queries and updates can be written in the same language as the rest of the program, and at least in principle, it should be possible to provide curation features reusably via program transformations. As a first step, it is important to establish that realistic curated databases can be implemented in a cross-tier programming language. In this paper, we describe such a case study: reimplementing the web frontend of a real-world scientific database, the IUPHAR/BPS Guide to Pharmacology (GtoPdb), in the Links programming language. We show how features such as language-integrated query simplify the development process, and rule out common errors. We show that the Links implementation performs fewer database queries, while the time needed to handle the queries is comparable to the Java version. While there is some overhead to using Links because of its comparative immaturity compared to Java, the Links version is viable as a proof-of-concept case study.

中文翻译：

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策展数据库的跨层 Web 编程：案例研究

策划的数据库已成为跨科学学科的重要信息来源，并且由于专家的手工工作，往往成为重要的参考资料。出处跟踪、归档和数据引用等功能被广泛认为是策展数据库的重要功能，但实现这些功能具有挑战性，并且小型数据库项目通常缺乏这样做的资源。科学数据库应用程序不仅是数据库本身，而且是显示数据的 Web 应用程序生态系统，以及支持数据管理的应用程序。支持高级策展功能需要更改所有这些组件，目前还没有办法以可重用的方式提供此类功能。已经提出了跨层编程语言来简化 Web 应用程序的创建，开发人员使用单一、统一的语言编写应用程序。因此，数据库查询和更新可以用与程序其余部分相同的语言编写，至少在原则上，应该可以通过程序转换提供可重用的管理功能。作为第一步，重要的是要确定可以用跨层编程语言实现真实的策划数据库。在本文中，我们描述了这样一个案例研究：使用 Links 编程语言重新实现真实世界科学数据库的 Web 前端，即 IUPHAR/BPS 药理学指南 (GtoPdb)。我们展示了语言集成查询等功能如何简化开发过程，并排除常见错误。我们展示了 Links 实现执行更少的数据库查询，而处理查询所需的时间与 Java 版本相当。由于与 Java 相比，Links 相对不成熟，因此使用 Links 会产生一些开销，但 Links 版本作为概念验证案例研究是可行的。