In the age of cloud-connected mobile devices, users want responsive apps that read and write shared data everywhere, at all times, even if network connections are slow or unavailable. The solution is to replicate data and propagate updates asynchronously. Unfortunately, such mechanisms are notoriously difficult to understand, explain, and implement.
To address these challenges, we present GSP (global sequence protocol), an operational model for replicated shared data. GSP is simple and abstract enough to serve as a mental reference model, and offers fine control over the asynchronous update propagation (update transactions, strong synchronization). It abstracts the data model and thus applies both to simple key-value stores, and complex structured data. We then show how to implement GSP robustly on a client-server architecture (masking silent client crashes, server crash-recovery failures, and arbitrary network failures) and efficiently (transmitting and storing minimal information by reducing update sequences).

/pdf/global-sequence-protocol-a-robust-abstraction-for-replicated-27ebsi9x9f.pdf

Global Sequence Protocol: A Robust Abstraction for Replicated Shared State

Hop.js is a multitier programming environment for JavaScript. It allows a single JavaScript program to describe the client-side and the server-side components of a web application. Its runtime environment ensures consistent executions of the application on the server and on the client. This paper overviews the Hop.js design. It shows the JavaScript extensions that makes it possible to conceive web applications globally. It presents how Hop.js interacts with the outside world. It also briefly presents the Hop.js implementation. It presents the Hop.js web server implementation, the handling of server-side parallelism, and the JavaScript and HTML compilers.

A glimpse of Hopjs

Distributed applications are traditionally developed as separate modules, often in different languages, which react to events, like user input, and in turn produce new events for the other modules. Separation into components requires time-consuming integration. Manual implementation of communication forces programmers to deal with low-level details. The combination of the two results in obscure distributed data flows scattered among multiple modules, hindering reasoning about the system as a whole. The ScalaLoci distributed programming language addresses these issues with a coherent model based on placement types that enables reasoning about distributed data flows, supporting multiple software architectures via dedicated language features and abstracting over low-level communication details and data conversions. As we show, ScalaLoci simplifies developing distributed systems, reduces error-prone communication code and favors early detection of bugs.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3276499

Distributed system development with ScalaLoci

Eliom is a dialect of OCaml for Web programming in which server and client pieces of code can be mixed in the same file using syntactic annotations. This allows to build a whole application as a single distributed program, in which it is possible to define in a composable way reusable widgets with both server and client behaviors. Our language also enables simple and type-safe communication. Eliom matches the specificities of the Web by allowing the programmer to interleave client and server code while maintaining efficient one-way server-to-client communication. The Eliom language is both sufficiently small to be implemented on top of an existing language and sufficiently powerful to allow expressing many idioms of Web programming.

/pdf/eliom-a-core-ml-language-for-tierless-web-programming-m93mmijg1d.pdf

Eliom: A core ML language for Tierless Web programming

Eliom is a dialect of OCaml for Web programming. It can be used both server and client-side. Server and client sections can also be mixed in the same file using syntactic annotations. This allows one to build a whole application as a single program, in which it is possible to define in a composable way reusable widgets with both server and client behaviors. Our language also enables simple type-safe communication. Eliom matches the specificities of the Web by allowing the programmer to interleave client and server code while maintaining efficient one-way server-to-client communication.We present how the language extensions introduced by Eliom enable a new paradigm for Web programming, and how this paradigm allows building complex libraries easily, safely, and in a composable manner.

https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01407898/document

Eliom: tierless Web programming from the ground up

Tierless programming languages enable developing the typical server, client and database tiers of a web application as a single mono-linguistic program. This development style is in stark contrast to the current practice which requires combining multiple technologies and programming languages. A myriad of tierless programming languages has already been proposed, often featuring a JavaScript-like syntax. Instead of introducing yet another, we advocate that it should be possible to develop tierless web applications in existing general-purpose languages. This not only reduces the complexity that developers are exposed to, but also precludes the need for new development tools. We concretize this novel approach to tierless programming by discussing requirements on its future instantiations. We explore the design space of the program analysis for determining and the program transformation for realizing the tier split respectively. The former corresponds to new adaptations of an old familiar, program slicing, for tier splitting. The latter includes several strategies for handling cross-tier function calls and data accesses. Using a prototype instantiation for JavaScript, we demonstrate the feasibility of our approach on an example web application. We conclude with a discussion of open questions and challenges for future research.

/pdf/towards-tierless-web-development-without-tierless-languages-40i0722mg8.pdf

Towards Tierless Web Development without Tierless Languages

Web programmers are often faced with several challenges in the development process of modern, rich internet applications. Technologies for the different tiers of the application have to be selected: a server-side language, a combination of JavaScript, HTML and CSS for the client, and a database technology. Meeting the expectations of contemporary web applications requires even more effort from the developer: many state of the art libraries must be mastered and glued together. This leads to an impedance mismatch problem between the different technologies and it is up to the programmer to align them manually. Multi-tier or tierless programming is a web programming paradigm that provides one language for the different tiers of the web application, allowing the programmer to focus on the actual program logic instead of the accidental complexity that comes from combining several technologies. While current tierless approaches therefore relieve the burden of having to combine different technologies into one application, the distribution of the code is explicitly tied into the program. Certain distribution decisions have an impact on crosscutting concerns such as information security or offline availability. Moreover, adapting the programs such that the application complies better with these concerns often leads to code tangling, rendering the program more difficult to understand and maintain. We introduce an approach to multi-tier programming where the tierless code is decoupled from the tier specification. The developer implements the web application in terms of slices and an external specification that assigns the slices to tiers. A recommender system completes the picture for those slices that do not have a fixed placement and proposes slice refinements as well. This recommender system tries to optimise the tier specification with respect to one or more crosscutting concerns. This is in contrast with current cutting edge solutions that hide distribution decisions from the programmer. In this paper we show that slices, together with a recommender system, enable the developer to experiment with different placements of slices, until the distribution of the code satisfies the programmer's needs. We present a search-based recommender system that maximises the offline availability of a web application and a concrete implementation of these concepts in the tier-splitting tool Stip.js.

Search-based Tier Assignment for Optimising Offline Availability in Multi-tier Web Applications

In today’s web applications asynchronous requests to remote services using callbacks or futures are omnipresent. The continuation of such a non-blocking task is represented as a callback function that will later be called with the result of the request. This style of programming where the remainder of a computation is captured in a continuation function is called continuation-passing style (CPS). This style of programming can quickly lead to a phenomenon called “call- back hell”, which has a negative impact on the maintain- ability of applications that employ this style. Several alter- natives to callbacks are therefore gaining traction within the web domain. For example, there are a number of frameworks that rely on automatically transforming sequential style code into the continuation-passing style. However, these frame- works often employ a conservative approach in which each function call is transformed into CPS. This conservative approach can sequentialise requests that could otherwise be run in parallel. So-called delimited continuations can remedy, but require special marks that have to be manually inserted in the code for marking the beginning and end of the continuation. In this paper we propose an alternative strategy in which we apply a delimited CPS transformation that operates on a Program Dependence Graph instead to find the limits of each continuation.We implement this strategy in JavaScript and demonstrate its applicability to various web programming scenarios.

Dependence-driven delimited CPS transformation for JavaScript

Cloud Types is an interesting EC model that closely integrates its consistency model with the programming language, rendering EC programming more feasible for the average programmer. We have created an open implementation of the model in a JavaScript end-to-end implementation that can act both as an experimental platform for researchers and as an open EC model for the web. Furthermore we are experimenting with additions to the model such as an RDBM-like authorization system in combination with Views in order to give more control over the state and to allow partitioning.

/pdf/an-open-implementation-of-cloud-types-for-the-web-ypba7e8ce0.pdf

Laure Philips

Papers

Towards Tierless Web Development without Tierless Languages

Search-based Tier Assignment for Optimising Offline Availability in Multi-tier Web Applications

Dependence-driven delimited CPS transformation for JavaScript

An open implementation of cloud types for the web

Search-based Tier Assignment for Optimising Offline Availability in Multi-tier Web Applications