When: 10th February, 2015

Who: Simon Fowler, University of Edinburgh

Title: Functional Web Programming in Links and F#

Functional programming has been shown to be a good fit for web

development. The Links functional web programming language

developed by Cooper, Lindley, Wadler and Yallop at the University

of Edinburgh allows client, server, and database code to be

written in a single language, while providing abstractions such

as formlets to allow form data to be retrieved in a structured,

elegant and type-safe manner. More recently, these ideas have

been picked up and expanded upon in IntelliFactory's WebSharper

web framework, which embeds many of the concepts in the .NET

functional-first language F#.

In this talk, I'll take a look at Links and WebSharper, comparing

the approaches taken by each. In doing so, I'll explore some of

the language features of F# which make the embedding possible,

revisit some web abstractions such as Formlets, and talk about

some more recent abstractions such as Piglets (yes, Piglets).