Tulane Engineering Forum

Boumediene Belkhouche

Boumediene Belkhouche is a Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Tulane University. His research areas include Programming Languages and Software Engineering. In Software Engineering, he has been investigating issues associated with requirement expression and analysis, abstract data types specifications, multiple view analysis, and object-oriented design and analysis. In Programming Languages, he has been investigating the formal semantics of concurrent processes and new computational models for Internet Programming Languages. He is also involved in the Mississippi River Project. He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE.

Presentation Topic: Languages for Developing Web-based Applications

By Boumediene Belkhouche

Summary

The World Wide Web (WWW) is continuously redefining the computing landscape. The new emerging computational model is still fluid. This fluidity is driven by the dynamic mushrooming of web-based needs. These needs span the entire daily life spectrum and do not seem to approach a stable stage. So, instead of the canonical Input-Process-Output computing framework well supported by established programming languages, new languages to support web-based applications are needed. The definition of such languages (e.g., Java) have basically tried to extend existing ones. This approach, however, is proving to be more of a constraint to developers and users, because it does not establish a comprehensive computational model of the World Wide Web. Then the intent of this talk is:

1. to identify web-based needs;
2. to describe a model of the World Wide Web;
3. to define web-based applications and address issues associated with such applications;
4. to survey languages that are currently used for web-based applications;
5. to propose requirements that the new generation of web-based languages must fulfill.