Abstract

Web applications (webapps) are very popular because they are easy to deploy and they can invoke data and programs supplied by third parties, as building blocks. Yet, writing web applications is complex because developers are required to reason about distributed computation and to write code using heterogeneous languages, often not originally designed with distributed computing in mind. Testing is the common way to catch bugs as current technologies provide limited support. There are doubts this can scale up to meet the expectations of more sophisticated web applications. QWeSST is a type-safe language that provides abstract primitives to manage the two main forms of distributed computation found on the web: remote procedure calls (code executed on a server on behalf of a client) and mobile code (server code executed on a client). We use it to express interaction patterns commonly found on the Web as well more sophisticated forms that are beyond current web technologies.