A system and environment in which the data within the system can be defined and manipulated in terms of a world model or Ontology, and for which the DBA and GUI portions of the programming tasks can be specified and automatically generated from this Ontology is provided. The invention includes the following components: extensions to a programming language that describe and abstract the logic associated with interacting with external `persistent` storage; extensions to a programming language to handle type inheritance; extensions to the programming language to allow specification of the GUI content and layout; extensions to the programming language to allow specification and inheritance of scriptable actions; a means whereby the data described in the programming language can be translated automatically into generating the corresponding tables and fields in external databases and the queries and actions necessary to access those databases and read/write to them; a high level ontology designed to facilitate operation of the particular application being developed; and a means to tie types and their access into a suite of federated type or container/engine specific servers responsible for the actual persistence of the data. Other improvements and extensions are also claimed.