Editlets
László Domoszlai, Bas Lijnse, Rinus Plasmeijer · 2014
The iTask framework enables the construction of distributed systems where users work together on the internet. It offers a domain specific language for defining applications, embedded in the lazy functional language Clean. From the mere declarative specification of the tasks to do and their interconnection, a multi-user web application is generated which can coordinate the work thus described. User interfaces are generated automatically which is realized by using type-driven generic functions. Although this way of generating user interfaces entails a number of benefits for the programmer, it suffers from the lack of possibility to create custom user interface building blocks. In a precursory work we proposed tasklets for the development of custom, interactive web components. However, experimenting with real-world applications indicated that they lack some fundamental properties limiting their usability; these are the tight integration with the type-driven user interface generation, and the capability of working with shared data. In this paper, we introduce editlets to overcome these limitations. In addition, editlets also provide a general way to communicate changes instead of exchanging the whole data to reduce communication overhead.