Hop: Scheme-Based Language for AJAX Programming

JavaScriptSearch
Friday, June 2, 2006; 06:50 AM

Hop is a new programming language designed for the Web 2.0. It is a higher-order language for programming interactive web applications such as web agendas, web galleries, music players, etc. Hop can be viewed as a replacement for traditional graphical toolkits. HOP is implemented as a Web broker, i.e., a Web server that may act indifferently as a regular Web server or Web proxy.

HOP demonstration.

The project website at http://hop.inria.fr/ features a demonstration of a simple web-based desktop, complete with RSS reader, games, and text editor. HOP is freely available for download.

The pages generated by HOP are compatible with browsers compliant with W3C and ECMA standards. That is, they are operational with Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, Konqueror, and Opera. On the other hand, they cannot be visualized with Internet Explorer version 5 and 6.

The current stable HOP version is 1.3.1. This unstable version only runs on platforms running the Linux operating system.  The Bigloo compiler is the only requirement to install HOP.

HOP features:

• an extensive set of widgets for programming fancy GUIs.
• an extensive set of libraries for:
  • handling database accesses.
  • dealing with network connections.
  • parsing wiki documents.
  • supporting various protocols such as IMAP, ICALENDAR, ...
  • supporting various formats such as EXIF, ID3, ...
  • parsing and generating XML documents.

About the Bigloo compiler (from http://www-sop.inria.fr/mimosa/fp/Bigloo/):

Bigloo is a Scheme implementation devoted to one goal: enabling Scheme based programming style where C(++) is usually required. Bigloo attempts to make Scheme practical by offering features usually presented by traditional programming languages but not offered by Scheme and functional programming. Bigloo compiles Scheme modules. It delivers small and fast stand alone binary executables. Bigloo enables full connections between Scheme and C programs, between Scheme and Java programs, and between Scheme and C# programs.