Date of Award
2010
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science
Program
Computer Science
Supervisor
Dr. Stephen M. Watt
Abstract
Over two decades, the Web has evolved into a highly successful and robust platform to share ideas, spread information, communicate and transact. This evolution has been aided by constantly evolving technologies that have enabled developers to expand the applications and utility of the Internet. In other computing settings, the duality of code and data has proven to be a powerful and productive conceptual device. However, the concept of code/data duality has not been prevalent in the web programming environment. The concept of “homoiconicity” or code is data and data is code has brought about innovative programming techniques like metaprogramming in the past. We explore the idea of a uniform programming environment, where code and data are represented in the same manner and explore how this property of homoiconicity can be exploited in a web setting. This could also enable uniform handling of access and persistence and uniform transformation mechanisms. Such an abstraction could allow metaprogramming in web development which can provide an efficient solution to problems such as saving the web page state over a stateless web protocol.
Recommended Citation
Mohan, Rachita, "Uniform Treatment of Code and Data in the Web Setting" (2010). Digitized Theses. 4637.
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/digitizedtheses/4637