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Lazy is a language and a system to publish databases on the Web and to prototype full Web applications. Unlike systems/languages like Perl, PHP, ColdFusion, JSP, ASP, Lazy is declarative. There is no imperative programming required to create a Web site on top of a database with Lazy. Lazy is mainly intended to study and explore new ways of presenting database contents as hypertexts (Web sites in fact). Thus a Lazy specification is simply a set of node schemas that exactly reflects the hypertextual structure of the site. In addition to the standard hypertext links (reference links), Lazy introduces inclusion (translusion) links (to construct complex node contents) and "expand-in-place" links. The Lazy system The Lazy system is composed of: a declarative language to define a hypertext structure (node schemas and links) and the contents of each node (in terms of database elements); a compiler to translate node schemas into database queries; a node server to take node requests, execute the appropriate database queries, and return an HTML or XML document. Lazy has been developed at the Centre Universitaire d'informatique by the Information system interface (ISI) research group. It is now available as a free software package.

Introduction and tutorial A brief introduction to (a part of) the Lazy language with online examples A simple interactive museum made with Lazy (source in Lazy) Documentation and download Installation guide and language reference manual (pdf) (still under development) The binaries, sources, and documentation can be downloaded from Lazy at SourceForge (CVS Repository) Related Technical Reports and Articles Designe and Analysis of Active Hypertext Views on Databases Design and Analysis of Virtual Museums (contains an introduction to the Lazy language) Languages and Tools to Specify Hypertext Views on Databases Des documents virtuels pour lire les bases de données (using Lazy to generate virtual documents) Generating Hypertext Views on Databases (full paper) Generating Hypertext Views on Databases (short paper) "World-Wide Web: What Links to Databases?" "World-Wide Web: What Links to Databases? Part II" .