A Meta-EDSL for Distributed Web Applications

Journal article, 2017

We present a domain-specific language for constructing and configuring web applications distributed across any number of networked, heterogeneous systems. Our language is embedded in Haskell, provides a common framework for integrating components written in third-party EDSLs, and enables type-safe, access-controlled communication between nodes, as well as effortless sharing and movement of functionality between application components. We give an implementation of our language and demonstrate its applicability by using it to implement several important components of distributed web applications, including RDBMS integration, load balancing, and fine-grained sandboxing of untrusted third party code. The rising popularity of cloud computing and heterogeneous computer architectures is putting a strain on conventional programming models, which commonly assume that one application executes on one machine, or at best on one out of several identical machines. With our language, we take the first step towards a programming model better suited for a computationally multicultural future.