Robert Van Herk

Name:
Robert van Herk

Email:
rherk@students.cs.uu.nl

Thesis Project

Topic/Area

Creating a Haskell DSEL for writing web applications.

Project

Project title:
WebFunctions

Advisor:
Doaitse Swierstra

Start date:
1-1-2005

End date:
1-10-2005

Description

The HTTP protocol is designed to transfer static contents. Because of this, there is no place for session history, or meta information, in the protocol.

Over the years, they added the possibility to transfer dynamic contents through HTTP by increasingly better abstractions.

First, CGI was invented. In CGI, instead of returning the static contents of a file as a response to a web browser's request, the server starts a script, collects the script's output, and sends this output back to the client when the script has terminated. In CGI, it is the task of the server-side scripts to maintain session information, etcetera. Besides that, in this setup, it is very hard to share and synchronize data between multiple sessions.

In the following years, language providing better abstractions were created. All these systems still have huge disadvantages from the software architectural point of view. For example, they rely on the use of untyped expressions, or explicit database bindings, or intertwined model, view and controller logic, or any combination of the above.

The goal of the WebFunctions? project is create a new language that solves all of these shortcomings.

Acquiring WebFunctions?

If you want to use WebFunctions? , please contact me by e-mail, so that I can give you read access to my subversion repository.

Thesis