Client-side Scripting using Meta-programming (Bachelor thesis)

Supervised by David Bednarek

Charles University in Prague, 2007

"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.

Thesis and more information

• Download the thesis (PDF)
• Download brief technical report (PDF)
• Look at the slides from internship talk at MSR (PDF)

Related projects

Ideas from this work inspired an industrial product WebSharper that delivers much of the functionality described above. In the open-source world, the FunScript project provides a way to translate F# to JavaScript with the support for asynchronous computations, but provides a novel technique for integration with JavaScript and server-side data-sources using F# type providers (as of 2013).

Bibtex

Together with the Links project, the project was one of the first tools for client/server web programming using statically typed programming language, so if you want to cite the work, you can use the following BibTeX information:

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@@MastersThesis{fswebtools-thesis,
  author = {Petricek, Tomas},
  type   = {Bachelor Thesis},
  title  = {Client-side Scripting using Meta-programming},
  school = {Charles University in Prague},
  year   = {2007}
}

If you have any comments, suggestions or related ideas, I'll be happy to hear from you! Send me an email at tomas@tomasp.net or get in touch via Twitter at @tomaspetricek.