Type-Oriented Construction of Web User Interfaces

Michael Hanus

Proc. of the 8th International ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming (PPDP'06), ACM Press, pp. 27-38, 2006
© ACM Press

This paper proposes a new technique for the high-level construction of type-safe web-oriented user interfaces. Our approach is useful to equip applications processing structured data with interfaces to manipulate these data in an efficient and maintainable way. The interfaces are web-based, i.e., the data can be manipulated with standard web browsers without any specific requirements on the client side. In order to support type-safe user interfaces, i.e., interfaces where users can only input type-correct data (types can be standard types of a programming language as well as any computable predicate on the data), we propose a set of type-oriented building blocks from which interfaces for more complex types can be easily constructed. This technique leads to a very concise and maintainable implementation of web-based user interfaces. We show an implementation of this concept in the declarative multi-paradigm language Curry. In particular, its integrated functional and logic features are exploited to enable the high level of abstraction proposed in this paper.

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