Spotlight Topics
Most of the content on this page is related to one of the topics that I was recently interested in, so here you can find a page for every topic with some my articles, comments and other useful links:
- F# Language, Functional Programming, etc.
F# is a multi-paradigm programming language for .NET from Microsoft Resarch, which supports functional, object-oriented and language-oriented style.
- Phalanger - PHP Language Compiler for .NET
Phalanger is an open-source PHP compiler, which is able to run many existing PHP applications and is fully integrated with .NET.
- C# 3.0 and the LINQ Project
Aside from querying facilities integrated in the new language version, C# 3.0 also enables using several interesting functional techniques.
Academic Stuff
As already mentioned, I'm a student of computer science at Faculty of Mathematics and Physics [^] of Charles University.
The topcis that I'm interested in are still changing :-), but you can find some up-to-date information on my academic page. My Bachelor thesis (it is available there) was about type-safe "AJAX" web development in F# with modality tracked in a type system using computation expressions (aka "monads"), so you can expect topics related to programming languages and tools...
- Visit my academic page.
Photography
I like taking photos, but updating the online gallery frequently was always a bit problem :-). That's why this page has a calendar, which shows a new picture every month (and also forces me to find and upload a new picture regularly).
Calendar - May 2008
- Calendars for years 2005, 2006 and also for 2007
- Some more photos can be found in photo gallery
More About Me
I'm student and Microsoft C# MVP from Prague, Czech Republic. I'm studying computer science at Charles University of Prague and I finished Bachelor studies in 2007.
Recently, I spent 3 months in Microsoft Research as an intern (with the F# team) and started wokring on the F# WebTools [^] project which allows developing "AJAX" applications purely in F# and this was also a topic of my thesis. I believe that F# and functional programming has a very promissing future.
The second topic that I'm involved in is maintaining of a project called Phalanger [^], which is a PHP language compiler started by my fellow students.
Latest Articles by Tomáš Petříček 
Thesis: Client-side Scripting using Meta-programming
I realized that I haven’t yet posted a link to my Bachelor Thesis, which I partially worked on during my visit in Microsoft Research and which I successfully defended last year. The thesis is about a client/server web framework for F# called F# WebTools, which I already mentioned here and its abstract is following:
“Ajax” programming is becoming a de-facto standard for certain types of web applications, but unfortunately developing this kind of application is a difficult task. Developers have to deal with problems like a language impedance mismatch, limited execution runtime in web browser on the client-side and no integration between client and server-side parts that are developed as a two independent applications, but typically form a single and homogenous application. In this work we present the first project that deals with all three mentioned problems but which still integrates with existing web technologies such as ASP.NET on the server and JavaScript on the client. We use the F# language for writing both client and server-side part of the web application, which makes it possible to develop client-side code in a type-safe programming language using a subset of the F# library, and we provide a way to write both server-side and client-side code as a part of single homogeneous type defining the web page logic. The code is executed heterogeneously, part as JavaScript on the client, and part as native code on the server. Finally we use monadic syntax for the separation of client and server-side code, tracking this separation through the F# type system.
The full text is available here: Client side scripting using meta-programming (PDF, 1.31MB)
Read the complete article
Monday, March 17, 2008
More Recent Articles
- New Version of Phalanger with Silverlight and VS 2008 Support (3/11/2008)
This article introduces new version of the Phalanger project, which incudes support for Silverlight 1.1 (alpha) and Visual Studio 2008 Integration package.
- F# Support for ASP.NET and Notes on Samples (3/8/2008)
In this article I look at the F# suppot for ASP.NET and at some interesting aspects of the samples that are available in the F# distribution.
- Phalanger at Lang.NET Symposium (2/2/2008)
Last week I attended the Lang.NET Symposium and I also did a short presentation about Phalanger. The slides and demos from the talk are attached.
- Writing Silverlight applications in PHP (12/7/2007)
In this article we will look how Phalanger can be used for developing Silverlight applications in the PHP language. We look at basic concepts like XAML as well as at a more complicated game.
Other Links
My Projects
F# Web Tools - Using the F# Web Tools you can author homogeneous client/server/database web applications in one type-checked project in F#. The distinction whether a code runs on the client (as JavaScript) or natively on the server is modeled using F# computation expressions.
Phalanger - PHP Language Compiler with several language extensions to allow smooth interoperability between PHP and other .NET (for example C#) code. Phalanger is complete enough to run applications like WordPress or MediaWiki.
LINQ Extensions - The project implements several useful extensions for the LINQ project. These extensions incude LINQ support for the C++/CLI language and simplified syntax or writing common types of database queries.
Other Projects Archive - Contains links to several older or partially completed projects that are no longer in active development, but may still be fun or even useful.