GrassRoots: socially-driven web sites for the masses

  • Authors:

  • Frank Uyeda;Diwaker Gupta;Amin Vahdat;George Varghese

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California, San Diego, San Diego, CA, USA;University of California, San Diego, San Diego, CA, USA;University of California, San Diego, San Diego, CA, USA;University of California, San Diego, San Diego, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2nd ACM workshop on Online social networks
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

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 socially-driven websites can be specified using it. We also describe the GR compiler that generates web sites based on GrassRoots specifications.