SVC: Selector-based View Composition for Web Frameworks

We present Selector-based View Composition (SVC), a new programming style for web application development. Using SVC, a developer defines a web page as a series of transformations on an initial state. Each transformation consists of a selector (used to select parts of the page) and an action (used to modify content matched by the selector). SVC applies these transformations on either the client or the server to generate the complete web page. Developers gain two advantages by programming in this style. First, SVC can automatically add Ajax support to sites, allowing a developer to write interactive web applications without writing any JavaScript. Second, the developer can reason about the structure of the page and write code to exploit that structure, increasing the power and reducing the complexity of code that manipulates the page’s content. We introduce SVC as a stateless, framework-agnostic development style. We also describe the design, implementation and evaluation of a prototype, consisting of a PHP extension using the WebKit browser engine [37] and a plugin to the popular PHP MVC framework Code Igniter [8]. To illustrate the general usefulness of SVC, we describe the implementation of three example applications consisting of common Ajax patterns. Finally, we describe the implementation of three post-processing filters and compare them to currently existing solutions.