Last week I gave a talk on how I have been creating web applications that very lightly wrap an underlying graph to provide not just content for a page but also the workflow and state of the user’s current interaction with the application.

As part of the talk I have created two demo apps that are available on Heroku. Crumbly Castle is inspired by Dark/Demon Souls and allows you to explore a castle that is populated by the ghosts of everyone who has ever played it.  The other offers a questionnaire system that generates characters in the style of the Elder Scroll or Fallout games. The code for the applications is on Github so you can fork it and deploy it for yourself. Both use the hosted Neo4J addon for Heroku which provides hassle-free hosting but is currently only available to beta program members.

You can obviously use both on your local machine.

Both of the demos are metaphors for more serious kinds of enterprise applications but I think it is often easier to produce prototypes or demos that are based on immediately engaging concepts. It certainly helps to have something that the audience can play with during the talk!

So briefly I just wanted to summarise the points I try to make during the talk and explain why you might want to look at using a graph as your web application store. So my major point is that web application development is usually page-centric, when you hit a page the controller tends to examine the whole state of the application to find out why you came to the page. Are you logged in? Were you trying to look at something? Is there a session associated with you?

I posit that we should instead be looking at the journeys between the pages as being the interesting things. Given where you are in the journey graph where can you go next? Essentially I am taking the same logic as a state machine or rule engine uses and instead expressing it as a relationships in a graph.

The most common trick the applications use is to assign a fixed url to a user session that identifies a node in the graph. Then with each transition I change the relationships the node has to other data based on the user’s actions and then simply send a redirect back to the fixed url which will then render a different result based on the current state of the node.

This means that the web application becomes very simple to write and the controller simply has to select the template and the related nodes that are needed to generate links and actions.

I think it is a really interesting approach that is a really natural fit for simplifying a lot of session-state heavy apps.