Experience Report: Ocsigen, a Web Programming Framework

摘要

The evolution of Web sites towards very dynamic applications makes it necessary to reconsider current Web programming tech-nologies. We believe that Web development would benefit greatly from more abstract paradigms and that a more semantical approach would result in huge gains in expressiveness. In particular, func-tional programming provides a really elegant solution to some im-portant Web interaction problems, but few frameworks take advan-tage of it. The Ocsigen project is an attempt to provide global solutions to these needs. We present our experience in designing this general framework for Web programming, written in Objective Caml. It provides a fully featured Web server and a framework for program-ming Web applications, with the aim of improving expressiveness and safety. This is done by taking advantage of functional program-ming and static typing as much as possible.