Declarative Web Site Management with Tiramisu

Early research in declarative web-site management identi ed a key principle: the separation of data management, site structure, and page presentation. This separation was made through the introduction of a logical representation, the site graph, de ned as a view over underlying data. While the separation of these three tasks provides many bene ts, existing systems require that the user implement the web site with the same system they use to design it, and this restriction is problematic for three reasons. First, many users are familiar with and prefer another implementation tool. Second, other tools may provide useful, new, or specialized features. Third, a complex site may be controlled by multiple organizations whose standards require different tools. In this paper we present a new architecture for declarative web-site management that separates design and implementation. We describe the challenges we faced during the implementation of Tiramisu, a system using this architecture.