Section: Software and Platforms

Web programming

Participants : Gérard Berry, Cyprien Nicolas, Manuel Serrano [correspondant] .

The HOP web programming environment

Hop is a higher-order language designed for programming interactive web applications such as web agendas, web galleries, music players, etc. It exposes a programming model based on two computation levels. The first one is in charge of executing the logic of an application while the second one is in charge of executing the graphical user interface. Hop separates the logic and the graphical user interface but it packages them together and it supports strong collaboration between the two engines. The two execution flows communicate through function calls and event loops. Both ends can initiate communications.

The Hop programming environment consists in a web broker that intuitively combines in a single architecture a web server and a web proxy. The broker embeds a Hop interpreter for executing server-side code and a Hop client-side compiler for generating the code that will get executed by the client.

An important effort is devoted to providing Hop with a realistic and efficient implementation. The Hop implementation is validated against web applications that are used on a daily-basis. In particular, we have developed Hop applications for authoring and projecting slides, editing calendars, reading RSS streams, or managing blogs.

Hop has won the software open source contest organized by the ACM Multimedia Conference 2007. It is released under the GPL license. It is available at http://hop.inria.fr .