Environment-Independent Methodology for Accessing External Data Sources

Abstract: - Software engineering is not a static field. Hardware is evolving, and so needs to do software development. Someone walking into a computer store today and buying a personal computer, will most likely end up owning a machine with more than one CPU. And that machine will most likely end up on a network, connected to a lot of other machines and devices. We are talking about paralelism and distribution, two features that threaten to make the software development process harder. To cope with these new parameters, new tools are claiming a place in the vangard of software creation. At the same time, there are also well-known established components, such as our traditional databases, that we still use (and need to use) the same way they have been used for many years. In this article, an environment-independent methodology to combine these two different worlds is be presented, showing that past and future can work together if we properly use abstraction and high-level software engineering tools. Key-Words:- Software engineering, database access, design patterns, functional programming