Flapjax: A Programming Language for Ajax Applications

Flapjax: A Programming Language for Ajax Applications Leo A. Meyerovich University of California, Berkeley lmeyerov@eecs.berkeley.edu Arjun Guha Brown University arjun@cs.brown.edu Jacob Baskin Google jacob.baskin@gmail.com Gregory H. Cooper Google ghcooper@gmail.com Michael Greenberg University of Pennsylvania mgree@seas.upenn.edu Aleks Bromfield Microsoft albromfi@microsoft.com Shriram Krishnamurthi Brown University sk@cs.brown.edu Abstract This paper presents Flapjax, a language designed for contemporary Web applications. These applications communicate with servers and have rich, interactive interfaces. Flapjax provides two key features that simplify writing these applications.First,it provides event streams,auniformabstrac-

tion for communication within a programs well as with external Web services. Second, the language itself is reactive: it automatically tracks data dependencies and propagates updates along those dataflows. This allows developers to write reactive interfaces in a declarative and compositional style. Flapjax is built on top of JavaScript.It runs on unmodified browsers and readily interoperates with existing JavaScript code. It is usable as either a programming language (that is compiled to JavaScript) or as a JavaScript library, and is designed for both uses. This paper presents the language, its design decisions, and illustrative examples drawn from several working Flapjax applications. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.3.2 [Programming Languages]:Language Classifications Data-flow languages General Terms Languages, Design Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. OOPSLA’09, October 25–29, 2009, Orlando, Florida, USA. Copyright c©2009 ACM 978-1-60558-734-9/09/10...$10.00 Keywords JavaScript, Web Programming, Functional Re- active Programming 1. Introduction The advent of broadband has changed the structure of application software....

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