WG211/M10Visser

Declaratively Programming the Mobile Web with Mobl by Eelco Visser

Abstract: A new generation of mobile touch devices, such as the
iPhone, Android and iPad, are equipped with powerful, modern browsers.
However, regular websites are not optimized for the specific features
and constraints of these devices, such as limited screen estate,
unreliable Internet access, touch-based interaction patterns, and
features such as GPS. While recent advances in web technology enable
web developers to build web applications that take advantage of the
unique properties of mobile devices, developing such applications
exposes a number of problems, specifically: developers are required to
use many loosely coupled languages with limited tool support and
application code is often verbose and imperative. We introduce mobl, a
new language designed to declaratively construct mobile web
applications. Mobl integrates languages for user interface design,
styling, data modeling, querying and application logic into a single,
unified language that is flexible, expressive, enables early detection
of errors, and has good IDE support.

Based on the paper: Zef Hemel, Eelco Visser. Declaratively Programming
the Mobile Web with Mobl. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual ACM
SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages,
and Applications, OOPSLA 2011. ACM, Portland, Oregon, USA, 2011.