iData for the World Wide Web – Programming Interconnected Web Forms

The Essence of Form Abstraction

“…iData The iData framework [23] supports a high degree of form abstraction, calling its abstractions iData. Underlying iData is an abstraction much like formlets.…”

“…But remarkably few web frameworks support it. Three existing web programming frameworks that do support some degree of abstraction over form components are WASH [28], iData [23] and WUI [11,12], each having distinctive features and limitations. (We discuss these further in Section 6.…”

Links: Web Programming Without Tiers

“…In PLT Scheme [15], composing new forms from old or making forms with a varying number of fields is possible, but not straightforward. In WASH [31] and iData [23], building forms that return new types requires declaring instances for those types in particular type classes, and in WASH a special type constructor needs to be used for forms with a varying number of fields. It was surprising for us to realize that composability of forms has received relatively little attention.…”

“…As with regular expression types, this was left to the future because it is well understood from other research efforts. In particular, the WASH and iData systems make effective use of type classes to support generic libraries [31,23].…”

Model-Based Testing of Thin-Client Web Applications and Navigation Input

“…We use a data structure representing the HTML code instead of a textual representation. The data structures for HTML from the iData approach [16,17] are reused. Without restricting the general approach in any way we test web applications constructed with iData.…”