Zef Hemel, Eelco Visser. Declaratively programming the mobile web with Mobl. In Cristina Videira Lopes, Kathleen Fisher, editors, Proceedings of the 26th Annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA 2011, part of SPLASH 2011, Portland, OR, USA, October 22 - 27, 2011. pages 695-712, ACM, 2011. [doi]
A new generation of mobile touch devices, such as the iPhone, iPad and Android devices, 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.