Flapjax: A programming language for ajax applications

Leo A. Meyerovich, Arjun Guha, Jacob Baskin, Gregory H. Cooper, Michael Greenberg, Aleks Bromfield, Shriram Krishnamurthi

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

99 Scopus citations

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, a uniform abstraction for communication within a program as 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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1-20
Number of pages20
JournalACM SIGPLAN Notices
Volume44
Issue number10
StatePublished - Oct 2009

Keywords

  • Functional reactive programming
  • JavaScript
  • Web programming

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