iData for the world wide web – programming interconnected web forms

  • Authors:
  • Rinus Plasmeijer;Peter Achten

  • Affiliations:
  • Software Technology, Nijmegen Institute for Computing and Information Sciences, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Netherlands;Software Technology, Nijmegen Institute for Computing and Information Sciences, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • FLOPS'06 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Functional and Logic Programming
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

In this paper we present the iData Toolkit. It allows programmers to create interactive, dynamic web applications with state on a high level of abstraction. The key element of this toolkit is the iData element. An iData element can be regarded as a self-contained object that stores values of a specified type. Generic programming techniques enable the automatic generation of HTML-forms from these types. These forms can be plugged into the web application. The iData elements can be interconnected. Complicated form dependencies can be defined in a pure functional, type safe, declarative programming style. This liberates the programmer from lots of low-level HTML programming and form handling. We illustrate the descriptive power of the toolkit by means of a small, yet complicated example: a project administration. The iData Toolkit is an excellent demonstration of the expressive power of modern generic (poly-typical) programming techniques.