Section: Application Domains

Web Programming Technologies

Despite the major social and economic impacts of the web revolution, current web programming methods and content representation are lagging behind and remain severely limited and in many respects archaic. Dangerously, designing web applications even becomes increasingly complex as it relies more and more on a jungle of programming languages, tools and data formats, each targeted toward a different application layer (presentation, application and storage). This often yields complex and opaque applications organized in silos, which are costly, inefficient, hard to maintain and evolve, and vulnerable to errors and security holes. In addition, the communication aspects are often handled independently via remote service invocations and represent another source of complexity and vulnerability. We believe that we reached a level where there is an urgent need and a growing demand for alternative programming frameworks that capture the essence of web applications: advanced content, data and communication. Therefore, successful candidate frameworks must capture rich document formats, data models and communication patterns. A crucial aspect is to offer correction guarantees and flexibility in the application architecture. For instance, applications need to be checked, optimized and managed as a whole while leveraging on the consistency of their individual components and data fragments. For all these reasons, we believe that a new generation of tools must be created and developed in order to overcome the aforementioned limitations of current web technologies.