EN FR
EN FR


Section: New Software and Platforms

Web programming

Participants : Yoann Couillec, Colin Vidal, Vincent Prunet, 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 .

The Bigloo compiler

The programming environment for the Bigloo compiler [7] is available on the Inria Web site at the following URL: http://www-sop.inria.fr/teams/indes/fp/Bigloo . The distribution contains an optimizing compiler that delivers native code, JVM bytecode, and .NET CLR bytecode. It contains a debugger, a profiler, and various Bigloo development tools. The distribution also contains several user libraries that enable the implementation of realistic applications.

Bigloo was initially designed for implementing compact stand-alone applications under Unix. Nowadays, it runs harmoniously under Linux and MacOSX. The effort initiated in 2002 for porting it to Microsoft Windows is pursued by external contributors. In addition to the native back-ends, the Bigloo JVM back-end has enabled a new set of applications: Web services, Web browser plug-ins, cross platform development, etc. The new Bigloo .NET CLR back-end that is fully operational since release 2.6e enables a smooth integration of Bigloo programs under the Microsoft .NET environment.