Djnn/Smala: A Conceptual Framework and a Language for Interaction-Oriented Programming

Mathieu Magnaudet (1) , Stéphane Chatty (2) , Stéphane Conversy (1) , Sébastien Leriche (1) , Célia Picard (1) , Daniel Prun (1)

1 ENAC - Ecole Nationale de l'Aviation Civile
2 DGAC - Direction Générale de l'Aviation Civile

The persistent difficulty to develop and maintain interactive software has unveiled the inadequacy of traditional imperative programming languages. In the recent years, several solutions have been proposed to enrich the existing languages with constructs dedicated to interaction. In this paper, we propose a different approach that takes interaction as the primary concern to build a new programming language. We present Djnn, a conceptual framework based on the concepts of process and process activation, then we introduce Smala a programming language derived from this framework. We propose a solution for the unification of the concepts of event and data-flow, and for the derivation of complex control structures from a small set of basic ones. We detail the syntax and the semantics of Smala. Finally, we illustrate through a real-size application how it enables building all parts of an interactive software. Djnn and Smala may offer designers and programmers usable means to think of interactions and translate them into running code.

Mots clés: Reactive Programming; Interactive Software; GUI Programming; Smala; Djnn

Domaines: Informatique [cs]; Génie logiciel [cs.SE]

Mathieu Magnaudet, Stéphane Chatty, Stéphane Conversy, Sébastien Leriche, Célia Picard, et al.. Djnn/Smala: A Conceptual Framework and a Language for Interaction-Oriented Programming. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction , 2018, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 2 (EICS), pp.1 - 27. ⟨10.1145/3229094⟩. ⟨hal-01815222⟩