CICS Associate Professor Arjun Guha Receives Most Influential Paper Award for Programming Language Flapjax

College of Information and Computer Sciences Associate Professor Arjun Guha received a Most Influential Paper Award at the ACM Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages and Applications (OOPSLA) conference today in Athens, Greece for his 2009 paper, “Flapjax: A Programming Language for Ajax Applications.” 

The award is presented annually to the authors of a paper presented at the OOPSLA conference held 10 years prior, chosen for its influence over the past decade. Presenting the award, the committee stated:

“Web programming requires dedicated abstractions that facilitate communication intensive applications with interactive interfaces. Flapjax reimagines how to program client-based web applications by providing two central abstractions adopted from functional reactive programming: event streams and so-called behaviors, which model computations that automatically track data dependencies and propagate updates. Flapjax seamlessly builds on top of JavaScript without requiring a dedicated runtime and thus interoperates with existing applications written in JavaScript. This design choice lowers the barrier to entry and makes the language approachable to novice users. In terms of modern usage, the reactive style and event stream abstraction advocated by Flapjax have been adopted widely, both in mobile apps and on the web. Moreover, recent research has shown that beyond interactivity, these abstractions also facilitate correct-by-design distributed applications in presence of concurrency as well as crash and communication faults.”

Flapjax, first released in 2006, is available at www.flapjax-lang.org. Although the Flapjax compiler sources no longer build with the latest version of Haskell, Guha has a 32-bit executable that runs on an old Debian virtual machine that no longer receives security updates.