Rethinking Traditional Web Interaction

Vincent Balat (1)

1 PPS - Preuves, Programmes et Systèmes

Web sites are evolving 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 riteria 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. 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. Most of the ideas we propose have been implemented in the Ocsigen Web programming framework that make possible to write a client-server Web applications as a single program. We will show that the interaction model we propose is fully compatible with this kind of applications.

Mots clés: Typing; Web interaction; Functional Web programming; Continuations

Domaines: Langage de programmation [cs.PL]

Vincent Balat. Rethinking Traditional Web Interaction. International Conference on Internet and Web Applications and Services, Jun 2013, France. pp.1. ⟨hal-00826774⟩