Month: August 2009

PHPEnkoder 1.6

Software4 Comments

Martin Rees caught another bug in PHPEnkoder, which was making it difficult to edit posts with comments containing e-mails. This problem has been solved by turning off the enkoder filters when displaying administrative panels.

In addition to the bugfix, there are two improvements. First, the internal enkoding system will choose names that are more likely to be unique. Second, I’ve added a shortcode, enkode. You can use it to manually enkode an arbitrary stretch of text, like so: [enkode]this will be enkoded[/enkode].

The latest version is available from the PHPEnkoder website and its home in the plugin directory.

Flapjax: A Programming Language for Ajax Applications

Flapjax, Papers, Programming Languages1 Comment

I am immensely pleased to report that our paper on Flapjax was accepted to OOPSLA 2009.

This paper presents Flapjax, a language designed for contemporary Web applications. These applications communicate with servers and have rich, interactive interfaces. Flapjax provides two key features that simplify writing these applications. First, it provides event streams, a uniform abstraction for communication within a program as well as with external Web services. Second, the language itself is reactive: it automatically tracks data dependencies and propagates updates along those data?ows. This allows developers to write reactive interfaces in a declarative and compositional style.

Flapjax is built on top of JavaScript. It runs on unmodi?ed browsers and readily interoperates with existing JavaScript code. It is usable as either a programming language (that is compiled to JavaScript) or as a JavaScript library, and is designed for both uses. This paper presents the language, its design decisions, and illustrative examples drawn from several working Flapjax applications.

The real heroes of this story are my co-authors. Leo, Arjun, and Greg were there for the initial, heroic-effort-based implementation. Jacob and Aleks wrote incredible applications with our dog food. Shriram, of course, saw the whole thing through. Very few of my contributions remain: the original compiler is gone (thank goodness); my thesis work is discussed briefly in How many DOMs? on page 15. Here’s to a great team and a great experience (and a great language)!