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), Maria, add yourself

When? This FoRGe will start the week after reading break. Scheduling a time slot will start shortly.

Schedule

Introduction
Week 1	The Links project's proposal. Wadler 2005.
Data access
Week 2	The essence of data access in Cω. Gavin Bierman, Erik Meijer, and Wolfram Schulte. ECOOP 2005.
Week 3	XDuce: A typed XML processing language. Haruo Hosoya and Benjamin C. Pierce. ACM TOIT 2003.
Security
Week 4	Finding Security Vulnerabilities in Java Applications with Static Analysis. Benjamin Livshits, Monica S. Lam. Usenix Security Symposium 2005.
Control flow in webapps
Week 5	The Influence of Browsers on Evaluators or, Continuations to Program Web Servers. Christian Queinnec. ICFP 2000.
Week 6	Spring Webflow. Keith Donald & Erwin Vervaet. The Serverside May 2005.

More materials?

It seems like there is an inexhaustible supply of stuff to read...

The list of papers and topics below is is intended to collect relevant information before setting a week-by-week schedule. It can also serve as a starting point for further reading.

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

• The bigwig project. Claus Brabrand, Anders Møller, Michael I. Schwartzbach. ACM TOIT 2002.
• The JWig Project. Website
• XDuce: A typed XML processing language. Haruo Hosoya and Benjamin C. Pierce. ACM TOIT 2003.
• ...

Security

• Finding Security Vulnerabilities in Java Applications with Static Analysis. Benjamin Livshits, Monica S. Lam. Usenix Security Symposium 2005.

What's used in the real world?

• Php, JSP, Spring Webflow, Java Server Faces 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