Home // International Journal On Advances in Internet Technology, volume 7, numbers 1 and 2, 2014 // View article

Rethinking Traditional Web Interaction: Theory and Implementation

Authors:
Vincent Balat

Keywords: Typing; Web interaction; Functional Web programming; Continuations

Abstract:
In recent years, Web sites evolved into ever more complex distributed applications. But current Web programming tools are not fully adapted to this evolution, and force programmers to worry about too many inessential details. We want to define an alternative programming style better fitted to that kind of applications. To do that, we propose an analysis of Web interaction in order to break it down into very elementary notions, based on semantic criteria instead of technological ones. This allows defining a common vernacular language to describe the concepts of current Web programming tools, but also some other new concepts. We propose to use these new concepts to create new frameworks for programming Web applications. This results in a significant gain of expressiveness. The understanding and separation of these notions also makes it possible to get strong static guarantees, that can help a lot during the development of complex applications, for example by making impossible the creation of broken links. We show how most of the ideas we propose have been implemented in the Ocsigen Web programming framework. Ocsigen makes possible to write a client-server Web applications as a single program and the interaction model we propose is fully compatible with this kind of applications.

Pages: 63 to 74

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2014. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 30, 2014

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2652