Marc Battyani

Title: A Framework for Automatic Web Application Generation

Abstract: Web sites have evolved from static documents to simple applications (eCommerce) and now to complete applications. Today, frameworks like J2EE and .Net have emerged for writing these applications made of tens to hundreds of object classes. These huge frameworks deals mostly with the business logic (middleware) but suffer from the limitations of their programming languages. The framework presented here shows how the unique qualities of Common Lisp can boost the productivity for writing web applications by more than an order of magnitude compared to those systems. This framework automatically generates the presentation, modification, validation, storage and data integrity layers of all the object classes of an application. It provides session management, web controls like those in ASP.NET, and co-browsing. Internaly, it makes extensive use of the Meta Object Protocol, CLOS generic functions, lexical closures, and on the fly code generation and compilation.

Keywords: web applications, Common Lisp, MOP, code generation, ASP, .Net, JSP, J2EE, SQL, database, HTML