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.