iData for the World Wide Web - Programming Interconnected Web Forms

Abstract. In this paper we present the iData Toolkit. It allows programmers to create interactive, dynamic web applications with state on evel 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...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: FLOPS
• Authors: Rinus Plasmeijer, Peter Achten
• Keywords: Automated Reasoning, FLOPS 2006, Idata Elements, Idata Toolkit, Programming Techniques