This talk presents new techniques for the high-level construction of type-safe web-oriented user interfaces. Our approach can be used to equip applications that process 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. In order to support type-safe user interfaces, i.e., interfaces where users can input only type-correct data, we propose a declarative construction based on a set of type-oriented building blocks from which interfaces for 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, Curry's integrated functional and logic features are exploited to enable the declarative construction of the web interfaces. In order to use existing web technology on the client side, we have implemented a compiler from Curry into JavaScript in order to enable the immediate checking of user input on the client side.
Profesor Hanus's research is mainly concerned with the integration of functional and logic programming languages, the design and implementation of declarative programming languages, type systems for logic programming, analysis techniques for declarative programs, programming environments and applications of declarative languages. He has published more than ninety papers on these topics in international conference proceedings, journals and books. Currently, he is involved in the design, implementation, and application of the multi-paradigm declarative language Curry where he directs several nationally and internationally funded research projects.
Sergio Antoy