Thesis: Client-side Scripting using Meta-programming

Tomas Petricek — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 10:07:04 GMT

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)

Concepts behind the C# 3.0 language

Tomas Petricek — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 15:19:03 GMT

One of the lectures that I attended last year was Programming Methodology and Philosophy of Programming Languages. The lecture was mostly about history of programming languages and how several features evolved, disappeared and than after many years appeared again in another programming language.

As I final work I decided to write an article that describes ideas that influenced the design of the C# 3.0 language. Some of these features are known from functional languages (for example from LISP or Haskell), some other were developed at Microsoft Research and appeared in the F# language or Cω. I also wanted to show in what ways are these features limited in the C# 3.0. I think that thanks to these limitation, the C# 3.0 is still a simple (or at least not difficult) to understand which is very important for mainstream language, but I find it interesting to know what is possible in other (less limited) languages.

You can also download the article in PDF (404kB)
The article is also available at CodeProject.com

Academic | TomasP.Net

Thesis: Client-side Scripting using Meta-programming

Concepts behind the C# 3.0 language