WebProgramming FoRGe

As web-based applications evolve from simple quick hacks and scripts to critical business applications and become increasingly more complex the issue of structuring, maintaining and (re-)engineering are becoming real issues.

This FoRGe will look at some of these problems and some of the solutions SE and PL researchers have proposed.

Who's interested? Kris, Eric, Andrew, Ivan, Lyndon, Navjot (I'm definitely in for the second half), add yourself

When? This FoRGe will start early or mid february. We will meet once a week and read/review one paper each week. What day and time still has to be decided and will be posted here.

Topics and potential papers

The list of papers and topics below is very much a work in progress...

We will use this to collect all relevant information before setting a week-by-week schedule. We won't be reading all the papers listed below. Likewise not all papers we will be reading are already on this page.

Continuations for the Web

Bridging the gap between the stateless http protocol and the statefull control structures of programming languages.

• Automatically Restructuring Programs for the Web. Matthews et. al. 2003. (note: is this a shorter version of this paper?)
• The Influence of Browsers on Evaluators or, Continuations to Program Web Servers. Christian Queinnec. ICFP 2000.
• The Continue Server. S. Krishnamurthi. PADL 2003.

Data access (Database, SQL and XML processing)

Web applications typically need to interact with external data sources and stores such as XML and relational databases. This is typically done through various APIs that are "untyped". Such untyped interfaces are undesirable (error prone, unchecked, hard to support in IDE, ...).

Monads and C#

• Comprehending Monads. Phillip Wadler. ICLFP 1990.
• The essence of data access in Cω. Gavin Bierman, Erik Meijer, and Wolfram Schulte. ECOOP 2005.
• Comprehension Syntax. Peter Buneman, Leonid Libkin, Dan Suciu, Val Tannen, Limsoon Wong. ACM SIGMOD 1994.
• Monad Comprehensions: A Versatile Representation for Queries. Torsten Grust. In The Functional Approach to Data Management - Modeling, Analyzing and Integrating Heterogeneous Data, pages 288-311, Springer, Sept. 2003.
• LINQ Webpage: How the Cω stuff is making it into C# and VisualBasic.

XML processing

Other topics / issues

• Security?
• Relation to AOP?
• Separation of concerns: presentation / bussiness logic / deployment configuration
• What's used in the industry: php, JSP, etc.

Links to other relevant material

• The Links Project: Wadler et. al are working on developing a language for web programming dubbed "Links". The project's proposal is an interesting read and provides many leads to related work.

-- KrisDeVolder - 23 Jan 2006