Zef Hemel, Eelco Visser. Declaratively Programming the Mobile Web with Mobl. In Kathleen Fisher, Cristina Videira Lopes, editors, Proceedings of the 2011 ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications, OOPSLA 2011. pages 695-712, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2011. [doi]
A new generation of mobile touch devices, such as the
iPhone, Android and iPad, are equipped with powerful, modern
browsers. However, regular websites are not optimized
for the specific features and constraints of these devices,
such as limited screen estate, unreliable Internet access,
touch-based interaction patterns, and features such as GPS.
While recent advances in web technology enable web developers
to build web applications that take advantage of
the unique properties of mobile devices, developing such
applications exposes a number of problems, specifically: developers
are required to use many loosely coupled languages
with limited tool support and application code is often verbose
and imperative. We introduce mobl, a new language
designed to declaratively construct mobile web applications.
Mobl integrates languages for user interface design, styling,
data modeling, querying and application logic into a single,
unified language that is flexible, expressive, enables early
detection of errors, and has good IDE support.