Ezra Cooper, Sam Lindley, Philip Wadler, Jeremy Yallop. Links: Web Programming Without Tiers. In Frank S. de Boer, Marcello M. Bonsangue, Susanne Graf, Willem P. de Roever, editors, Formal Methods for Components and Objects, 5th International Symposium, FMCO 2006, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, November 7-10, 2006, Revised Lectures. Volume 4709 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 266-296, Springer, 2006. [doi]
Links is a programming language for web applications that generates code for all three tiers of a web application from a single source, compiling into JavaScript to run on the client and into SQL to run on the database. Links supports rich clients running in what has been dubbed ‘Ajax’ style, and supports concurrent processes with statically-typed message passing. Links is scalable in the sense that session state is preserved in the client rather than the server, in contrast to other approaches such as Java Servlets or PLT Scheme. Client-side concurrency in JavaScript and transfer of computation between client and server are both supported by translation into continuation-passing style.