MIT Proposes to Simplify Web Programming with Ur/Web
Tag this as an upcoming technology development to watch. A researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed a new open source programming language called Ur/Web that proposes to “take the grunt work out of Web development,” as well as make web applications more secure.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the World Wide Web, wrote that since the web’s inception in 1989, “It has grown initially as a medium for the broadcast of read-only material from heavily loaded corporate servers to the mass of Internet connected consumers.” And as the web has evolved, so has the sheer complexity and number of interacting components on web pages.
“At a minimum, today’s rich applications must generate HTML, for document structure; CSS, for document formatting; JavaScript, a scripting language for clientside interactivity; and HTTP, a protocol for sending all of the above and more, to and from browsers,” said Adam Chlipala, the Douglas Ross Career Development Professor of Software Technology at MIT who developed Ur/Web.
According to the MIT News website, Ur/Web enables developers to write web applications as self-contained programs. “The language’s compiler — the program that turns high-level instructions into machine-executable code — then automatically generates the corresponding XML code and style-sheet specifications and embeds the JavaScript and database code in the right places.”
As for security, Ur/Web automatically prohibits unauthorized access between various elements on the web page. For example, a calendar widget could not affect advertising displayed on the same web page and vice versa.
Ur/Web’s capabilities stems primarily from two properties. The programming language is “strongly typed” and limits the scope of variables defined within functions.
Chlipala will present his work—Ur/Web: A Simple Model for Programming the Web—at the Association for Computing Machinery's Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages.
On a website for Ur/Web consultation projects, Chlipala notes that “there was no longer any need to describe the latest Ur/Web release as ‘beta’! It's probably not crazy to give this release a try in building your next serious application.”
