High-Level Server Side Web Scripting in Curry

by Michael Hanus

Proc. of the Third International Symposium on Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages (PADL'01), Springer LNCS 1955, pp. 76-92, 2001
© Springer-Verlag

We propose a new approach to program web services. Although we base our approach on the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) to ensure wide applicability, we avoid many of the drawbacks and pitfalls of traditional CGI programming by providing an additional abstraction layer implemented in the multi-paradigm declarative language Curry. For instance, the syntactical details of HTML and passing values with CGI are hidden by a wrapper that executes abstract HTML forms by translating them into concrete HTML code. This leads to a high-level approach to server side web service programming where notions like event handlers, state variables and control of interactions are available. Thanks to the use of a functional logic language, we can structure our approach as an embedded domain specific language where the functionalandlogic programming features of the host language are exploited to abstract from details and frequent errors in standard CGI programming.

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