Declarative web application development

The development of modern, highly interactive AJAX Web applications that enable dynamic visualization of data requires writing a great deal of tedious "plumbing code" to interface data between browser-based DOM and AJAX components, the application server, and the SQL database. Worse, each of these layers utilizes a different language. Further, much code is needed to keep the page and application states in sync using an imperative paradigm, which hurts simplicity. These factors result in a frustrating experience for today's Web developer. The FORWARD Project aims to alleviate this frustration by enabling pages that are "rendered views", in the SQL sense of "view". Our work in the project has led to a highly declarative approach whereby JavaScript/AJAX UI widgets automatically render views over the application state (database + session data + page data) without requiring the developer to tediously code how changes to the application state lead to invocation of the components' update methods.