Eliom: A Core ML Language for Tierless Web Programming

Abstract

Eliom is a dialect of OCaml for Web programming in which server and client pieces of code can be mixed in the same file using syntactic annotations. This allows to build a whole application as a single distributed program, in which it is possible to define in a composable way reusable widgets with both server and client behaviors. Our language also enables simple and type-safe communication. Eliom matches the specificities of the Web by allowing the programmer to interleave client and server code while maintaining efficient one-way server-to-client communication. The Eliom language is both sufficiently small to be implemented on top of an existing language and sufficiently powerful to allow expressing many idioms of Web programming.