The SWAC approach for sharing a web application's codebase between server and client

Abstract

A Web application's codebase is typically split into a server-side and a client-side with essential functionalities being implemented twice, such as validation or rendering. For implementing the codebase on the client, JavaScript, HTML and CSS are languages that all modern Web browsers can interpret. As the counterpart, the server-side codebase can be realized by plenty of programming languages, which provide facilities to implement standardized communication interfaces. While recent developments such as Node.js allow using JavaScript as a client-side programming languages outside the browser in a simple and efficient way also on the server-side, they lack offering a common codebase for the entire Web application. We present a flexible approach to enable sharing of presentation and business logic between server and client using the same codebase. Our approach aims at reducing development efforts and minimizing coding errors, while taking characteristic differences between server and client into account. We show the impact of our solution during an evaluation and in comparison to related work. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.