Research into Fully Integrated Data Environments (FIDE) has the goal of
substantially improving the quality of application systems while
reducing the cost of building and maintaining them. Application systems
invariably involve the long-term storage of data over months or years.
Much unnecessary complexity obstructs the construction of these systems
when conventional databases, file systems, operating systems,
communication systems, and programming languages are used. This
complexity limits the sophistication of the systems that can be built,
generates operational and usability problems, and deleteriously impacts
both reliability and performance. This book reports on the work of
researchers in the Esprit FIDE projects to design and develop a new
integrated environment to support the construction and operation of such
persistent application systems. It reports on the principles they
employed to design it, the prototypes they built to test it, and their
experience using it.