Flapjax: a programming language for Ajax applications

  • Authors:

  • Leo A. Meyerovich;Arjun Guha;Jacob Baskin;Gregory H. Cooper;Michael Greenberg;Aleks Bromfield;Shriram Krishnamurthi

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA;Brown University, Providence, RI, USA;Google, Mountain View, CA, USA;Google, Mountain View, CA, USA;University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA;Microsoft, Redmond, WA, USA;Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications
  • Year:
  • 2009

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

This paper presents Flapjax, a language designed for contemporary Web applications. These applications communicate with servers and have rich, interactive interfaces. Flapjax provides two key features that simplify writing these applications. First, it provides event streams, a uniform abstraction for communication within a program as well as with external Web services. Second, the language itself is reactive: it automatically tracks data dependencies and propagates updates along those dataflows. This allows developers to write reactive interfaces in a declarative and compositional style. Flapjax is built on top of JavaScript. It runs on unmodified browsers and readily interoperates with existing JavaScript code. It is usable as either a programming language (that is compiled to JavaScript) or as a JavaScript library, and is designed for both uses. This paper presents the language, its design decisions, and illustrative examples drawn from several working Flapjax applications.