Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2006, Volume 3945/2006, 242-258, DOI: 10.1007/11737414_17

iData for the World Wide Web – Programming Interconnected Web Forms

Rinus Plasmeijer and Peter Achten

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Abstract

In this paper we present the iData Toolkit. It allows programmers to create interactive, dynamic web applications with state on a high level of abstraction. The key element of this toolkit is the iData element. An iData element can be regarded as a self-contained object that stores values of a specified type. Generic programming techniques enable the automatic generation of HTML-forms from these types. These forms can be plugged into the web application. The iData elements can be interconnected. Complicated form dependencies can be defined in a pure functional, type safe, declarative programming style. This liberates the programmer from lots of low-level HTML programming and form handling. We illustrate the descriptive power of the toolkit by means of a small, yet complicated example: a project administration. The iData Toolkit is an excellent demonstration of the expressive power of modern generic (poly-typical) programming techniques.

Keywords  server side web programming - web forms - functional programming

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