Sunday, May 10, 2009

Hurray, a paper acceptance!

In the words of an esteemed collaborator, "DisneyWorld, whoooo!". [OOPSLA, 2009]

2 out of 4 so far this year (hopefully, after a lot more polishing, be 4/5 by the end of it!):

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.

I'll be keeping quiet on what my next thoughts on it are for awhile (three biggies on my mind, however: sharing, search, and parallelism) -- hopefully the next public things will be sometime next winter. Edit: one last biggie. Live programming.

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