Lambda the Ultimate

inactiveTopic The Web Server is Fully Functional
started 2/6/2002; 9:12:11 AM - last post 2/6/2002; 1:11:40 PM
Noel Welsh - The Web Server is Fully Functional  blueArrow
2/6/2002; 9:12:11 AM (reads: 443, responses: 1)
The Web Server is Fully Functional
Given the recent discussions on web services I thought readers might be interested in the SML Server and ML Server Pages. SML Server is an integration of SML (ML-Kit I believe) with AOLserver (used extensively in an ISP near you and passionately written about by Phil Greenspun). ML Server Pages are the higher-order statically typed answer to your ASP/JSP woes.

This is neat work but basically you're still writing HTML with an embedded programming language. IMO the PLT web server goes further to make web programming easy by using continuations to maintain state and Xexprs to mix HTML and computation.

PS: I don't think the web server is fully functional. I just wrote that to get you to read this article :)
Posted to general by Noel Welsh on 2/6/02; 11:06:07 AM

Oleg - Impedance mismatch in web programming  blueArrow
2/6/2002; 1:11:40 PM (reads: 479, responses: 0)
This is neat work but basically you're still writing HTML with an embedded programming language.

Programming with SXML can remove this impedance mismatch.

The following code http://zowie.metnet.navy.mil/~spawar/JMV-TNG/Code/get-obs.scm

implements essentially a Web service. The same (SXML) form is converted either into an HTML form, or into a request language sentence, which is later converted into an XML reply. Thus both the user interface to solicit a request, and the fulfillment of the request are SXML transformations, of the same form with different stylesheets. The script above is fully operational, and can tell you the weather at any interesting point in the globe:

http://zowie.metnet.navy.mil/cgi-bin/oleg/get-obs

Disclaimer: the script is meant to be used for demonstrational purposes only.