The Essence of Form Abstraction. Cooper, Lindley, Wadler, Yallop. 2008.

Abstract

Abstraction is the cornerstone of high-level programming; HTML forms are the principal medium of web interaction. However, most web programming environments do not support abstraction of form components, leading to a lack of compositionality. Using a semantics based on idioms, we show how to support compositional form construction and give a convenient syntax.

Full text

The Essence of Form Abstraction (APLAS 2008) (PDF).

Tech report

An idiom's guide to formlets. Contains full details of the validation extension, amongst other things.

Source code

Complete OCaml code for formlets including all extensions described in the paper.

"Creating linksCollab : An Assessment of Links as a Web Development Language," Steve Strugnell, 2008.
A bachelor's thesis describing the port of a commercial PHP project-management application to the Links version of Formlets, including an in-depth comparison between Links formlets and forms implemented in PHP.
Formlets Haskell module by Chris Eidhof. Tutorial.
Formlets Scheme module by Jay McCarthy.

Citation

Ezra Cooper, Sam Lindley, Philip Wadler, and Jeremy Yallop. "The essence of form abstraction." In Proceedings of the Sixth Asian Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems, 2008.
Ezra Cooper, Sam Lindley, Philip Wadler, and Jeremy Yallop." An idiom's guide to formlets." Technical report, University of Edinburgh, 2008.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{CLWY08essence,
  title = {The essence of form abstraction},
  author = {Ezra Cooper and Sam Lindley and Philip Wadler and Jeremy Yallop},
  booktitle = {Sixth Asian Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems},
  year = {2008}
}
@techreport{CLWY08idiomsguide,
  title = {An idiom's guide to formlets},
  author = {Ezra Cooper and Sam Lindley and Philip Wadler and Jeremy Yallop},
  institution = {University of Edinburgh},
  year = {2008}
}