Towards a logic framework for Web programming

Abstract

Despite the popularity of the World Wide Web as a development platform, a proper description of its architectural principles and design criteria has been established only in the last decade, by the introduction of the REpresentational State Transfer (REST) architectural style, which defines the resource as the key abstraction of information. Languages and tools used for Web programming generally suffer from a lack of proper understanding of its architecture and design constraints, and from an abstraction mismatch that makes it hard to fully exploit the Web potential. Declarative languages are well-suited for a programming system aimed at being respectful of the Web architecture and principles. Among logic technologies, tuProlog has been explicitly designed to be one of the enabling components of Internet-based infrastructures: its engineering properties make it suitable for use on the Web, where logic programming allows modification of resource behaviour at runtime. Accordingly, in this paper we present a Prolog-based logic model for programming Web resources, and outline a framework for developing Web applications grounded on that model.