The project

• Authors: Claus Brabrand;Anders Møller;Michael I. Schwartzbach
• Venue: ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT)
• Year: 2002

We present the results of the project, which aimsto design and implement a high-level domain-specific language forprogramming interactive Web services.A fundamental aspect of the development of the World Wide Webduring the last decade is the gradual change from static to dynamicgeneration of Web pages. Generating Web pages dynamically in dialogwith the client has the advantage of providing up-to-date andtailor-made information. The development of systems forconstructing such dynamic Web services has emerged as a whole newresearch area.The language is designed by analyzing itsapplication domain and identifying fundamental aspects of Webservices inspired by problems and solutions in existing Web servicedevelopment languages. The core of the design consists of asession-centered service model together with a flexibletemplate-based mechanism for dynamic Web page construction. Usingspecialized program analyses, certain Web-specific properties areverified at compile time, for instance that only valid HTML 4.01 isever shown to the clients. In addition, the design provideshigh-level solutions to form field validation, caching of dynamicpages, and temporal-logic based concurrency control, and itproposes syntax macros for making highly domain-specificlanguages.The language is implemented via widely available Webtechnologies, such as Apache on the server-side and JavaScript andJava Applets on the client-side. We conclude with experience andevaluation of the project.