Client-Side Cornucopia : Comparing the Built-In Application Architecture Models in the Web Browser

Peer reviewe

Preserving Access to Previous System States in the Lively Kernel

In programming systems such as the Lively Kernel, programmers construct applications from objects. Dedicated tools make it possible to manipulate the state and behavior of objects at runtime. Programmers are encouraged to make changes directly and receive immediate feedback on their actions. However, when programmers make mistakes in such programming systems, they need to undo the effects of their actions. Programmers either have to edit objects manually or reload parts of their applications. Moreover, changes can spread across many objects. As a result, recovering previous states is often error-prone and time-consuming. This report presents an approach to object versioning for systems like the Lively Kernel. Access to previous versions of objects is preserved using version-aware references. These references can be resolved to multiple versions of objects and, thereby, allow reestablishing preserved states of the system. We present a design based on proxies and an implementation in JavaScript

The Recursive Record Semantics of Objects Revisited

In a call-by-value language, representing objects as recursive records requires using an unsafe fixpoint. We design, for a core language including extensible records, a type system which rules out unsafe recursion and still supports the reconstruction of a principal type. We illustrate the expressive power of this language with respect to object-oriented programming by introducing a sub-language for «mixin-based» programming

Return of the Great Spaghetti Monster : Learnings from a Twelve-Year Adventure in Web Software Development

The widespread adoption of the World Wide Web has fundamentally changed the landscape of software development. Only ten years ago, very few developers would write software for the Web, let alone consider using JavaScript or other web technologies for writing any serious software applications. In this paper, we reflect upon a twelve-year adventure in web development that began with the development of the Lively Kernel system at Sun Microsystems Labs in 2006. Back then, we also published some papers that identified important challenges in web-based software development based on established software engineering principles. We will revisit our earlier findings and compare the state of the art in web development today to our earlier learnings, followed by some reflections and suggestions for the road forward.Peer reviewe

Object Incompleteness and Dynamic Composition in Java-Like Languages

Abstract. Object composition is often advocated as a more flexible alternative to standard class inheritance since it takes place at run-time, thus permitting the behavior of objects to be specialized dynamically. In this paper we present In-complete Featherweight Java (IFJ), an extension of Featherweight Java with in-complete objects, i.e., objects that require some missing methods which can be provided at run-time by composition with another (complete) object. Incomplete object usage is disciplined by static typing, therefore the language enjoys type safety (which implies no “message-not-understood ” run-time errors).