iData For The World Wide Web - Generic Programming Techniques for High-Level Server-Side Web Scripting (original) (raw)

In this paper we present the iData Toolkit. This toolkit offers web programmers a novel approach to programming interactive, dynamic web-sites with state on a high level of abstraction. The used concepts are inspired on our previous work on GUI programming. The key idea is to program applications with pure functional data models and functions from which the desktop GUI is derived automatically. In this paper we transfer these high level concepts to the web and show that web applications can be programmed in the same style. In addition we incorporate a number of improvements to the programming method. Because web technology is completely different from desktop GUI programming, we had to design an entirely new implementation method. The essential parts of this implementation rely on generic programming techniques. This has resulted in a concise and flexible implementation. The iData Toolkit is an excellent case study in applying generic programming techniques.