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Lightweight Declarative Server-Side Web Programming

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Book cover Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages (PADL 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 12548))

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Abstract

Web interfaces are an important part of many applications but their implementation is full of pitfalls due to the client/server nature of web programming. This paper presents a lightweight approach to web programming based on a standard infrastructure, in particular, the common CGI protocol between client and server. No specific additions are necessary on the server side. Our approach exploits declarative programming features to provide a high-level API for server-side web scripting. This API allows to check many programming errors at compile time by using functional (static typing, higher-order functions) as well as logic (free variables) programming features. Together with further abstractions, like session handling, persistence, and typeful database access, it is used for non-trivial web applications.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Actually, this was the approach taken in a very early continuation-based library for web programming in Curry [6]. The practical problems caused by the web-server processes motivated the current approach.

  2. 2.

    Variables and function names usually start with lowercase letters and the names of type and data constructors start with an uppercase letter. The application of f to e is denoted by juxtaposition (“f e”).

  3. 3.

    Actually, Curry is intended as an extension of Haskell although not all of the numerous features of Haskell are actually supported.

  4. 4.

    Actually, there is a simple script to wrap such web page definitions with showHtmlPage before compiling and installing it.

  5. 5.

    The actual definition in our library contains more operations which are not relevant here.

  6. 6.

    https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/forms.html#the-form-element.

  7. 7.

    Of course, this game can be implemented on the client side, but a realistic example with database access needs too much space.

  8. 8.

    The preprocessor is used since contemporary Curry implementations do not provide access to entities of the program at run time.

  9. 9.

    https://mdb.ps.informatik.uni-kiel.de/.

  10. 10.

    https://smap.informatik.uni-kiel.de/.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Informatik, CAU Kiel, 24098, Kiel, Germany

    Michael Hanus

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  1. Michael Hanus
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Correspondence to Michael Hanus .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. IMDEA Software Institute, Pozuelo de Alarcón, Spain

    José F. Morales

  2. University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

    Dominic Orchard

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Hanus, M. (2021). Lightweight Declarative Server-Side Web Programming. In: Morales, J.F., Orchard, D. (eds) Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages. PADL 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12548. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67438-0_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67438-0_7

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-67437-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-67438-0

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