DynXML: safely programming the dynamic web

  • Authors:
  • Joshua Sunshine;Jonathan Aldrich

  • Affiliations:
  • Carnegie Mellon University;Carnegie Mellon University

  • Venue:
  • APLWACA '10 Proceedings of the 2010 Workshop on Analysis and Programming Languages for Web Applications and Cloud Applications
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

A single web page in a complex web application has a huge number of possible runtime states. Functions, like JavaScript event handlers, that operate on such pages are extremely difficult to write correctly, because there are virtually no guaranteed constraints on the page. In this paper we propose DynXML, a new language for the web which safely and naturally mutates XML trees. Any dynamic web application written in DynXML is statically guaranteed to maintain the page in a subtype of a programmer-defined page type. Furthermore, event handlers are guaranteed to receive the page in the state they expect and leave it in the form expected by the next set of handlers---DynXML prevents page-manipulating programs from going wrong.