USI 2008 Session

Programming Web applications today is too hard for ordinary programmers. They have to deal with an excess of low-level tools and technologies causing them to drown in the accidental complexity. These tools are only adding to the problem instead of helping to solve real issues around security, distribution, asynchronicity, performance, and correctness. Using techniques and insights from decades of academic language research such as declarative and functional programming, monads, continuations, meta programming, and aspect weaving, the Live Labs Volta toolkit allows programmers to construct Web applications from simple single tier applications written in any .NET language (VB, C#, IronPython) by successive applications of declarative tier-splitting refactoring steps. Volta applications can be deployed on a wide variety of target platforms ranging from rich clients (desktop CLR and Silverlight) to pure standards-based Web browsers. Tier-splitting is currently also leveraged for instrumentation, automated testing, and foreign function calls.