Modern web applications can now offer desktop-like experiences from within the browser, thanks to technologies such as WebSockets, which enable low-latency duplex communication between the browser and the server. While these advances are great for the user experience, they represent a new responsibility for web developers who now need to manage and verify the correctness of more complex and potentially stateful interactions in their application. In this paper, we present a technique for developing interactive web applications that are statically guaranteed to communicate following a given protocol. First, the global interaction protocol is described in the Scribble protocol language -based on multiparty session types. Scribble protocols are checked for well-formedness, and then each role is projected to a Finite State Machine representing the structure of communication from the perspective of the role. We use source code generation and a novel type-level encoding of FSMs using multi-parameter type classes to leverage the type system of the target language and guarantee only programs that communicate following the protocol will type check. Our work targets PureScript -a functional language that compiles to JavaScript -which crucially has an expressive enough type system to provide static linearity guarantees. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through a web-based Battleship game where communication is performed through WebSocket connections.
Session Types in Web Development King et al. REF targeted web development in PureScript using the Concur UI framework and proposed a type-level encoding of EFSMs as multi-parameter type classes.
Multiparty Session Type-safe Web Development with Static Linearity
EPTCS 291, 2019, pp. 35-46
Computer Science