Re: [Caml-list] [announce] O'Browser : OCaml on browsers

[Vincent Balat <vincent.balat@pps.jussieu.fr>]

Hi,

On Tuesday 18 November 2008 19:15:28 Kuba Ober wrote:
> On Tuesday 18 November 2008, you wrote:
> > On Mon, 2008-11-17 at 22:43 -0500, Kuba Ober wrote:
> > > > Please note that this is an early version, in particular the DOM
> > > > interface module is neither pretty nor well typed.
> > > > However, it can already be used to create little applets or scripts
> > > > (as in the tutorial [2], the examples of the distribution [3] or my
> > > > webpage [4]) and we'll be glad to receive your comments or bug
> > > > reports.
> > >
> > > And the reason is?....
> >
> > To me, the fact that you can write portable lightweight applets sounds
> > like a good enough reason. That and the fact that I can see this being
> > used by stuff like Ocsigen to make for (even) richer client-server
> > applications.
>
> I presume that one can have some Javascript library to abstract out
> platform differences, but to have a whole new language? Well, of course
> what works works, the question is if the performance is any good.

Our final goal is of course to write the whole Web application in OCaml (both 
server and client sides). And thus to get the same static guarantees for the 
code beeing executed on the browser as we have on server side with Ocsigen 
(for example valid xhtml, etc).

To run OCaml on a browser, there are several solutions: 
For example you can use a compiler to js (see for example ocamljs), or a 
plugin. O'Browser is an alternative. It seems to be efficient enough for most 
uses. For tasks requiring very high efficiency, the only solution is a plugin
_and_ a very efficient xhtml/css rendering engine.

Cheers,
Vincent Balat