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Conclusions and Future Work

We have discussed from a practical point of view a number of issues involved in writing Internet and WWW applications using LP/CLP systems. In doing so, we have described PiLLoW, an Internet/WWW programming library for LP/CLP systems. PiLLoW provides facilities for generating HTML structured documents, producing HTML forms, writing form handlers, accessing and parsing WWW documents, and accessing code posted at HTTP addresses. We have also described the architecture of some application classes, including automatic code downloading, using a high-level model of client-server interaction, active modules. Finally we have also described an architecture for automatic LP/CLP code downloading for local execution, using generic browsers. We believe that the CIAO PiLLoW library can ease substantially the process of developing WWW applications using computational logic systems.

We are currently working on extended versions of the library which for example may make extensive use of concurrency internally (on those LP/CLP systems that support it) to overlap network requests and include support for (active) VRML. We are also considering interfaces with the Java language, including making the LP/CLP system be a Java library and also calling Java from the LP/CLP system in order to use its libraries. Finally, we are also considering the possibility of compiling LP/CLP code to the Java abstract machine. This seems possible, although at a cost in performance with respect to a direct WAM-like implementation, since the Java abstract machine does not have built-in support for unification or backtracking, which would have to be interpreted.

In addition to being part of the &-Prolog/CIAO system, the PiLLoW library is being provided as a public domain standard library for SICStus Prolog and other Prolog and CLP systems, supporting most of its functionality. Please contact the authors or consult our WWW site http://www.clip.dia.fi.upm.es for details.

The authors would like to thank Mats Carlsson, Tony Beaumont, Ken Bowen, Michael Codish, Markus Fromherz, Paul Tarau, Andrew Davison, and Koen De Bosschere for useful feedback on previous versions of the presented libraries. The first versions of the CIAO system and the html.pl library were developed under partial support from the ACCLAIM ESPRIT project.


next up previous
Next: References Up: The PiLLoW/CIAO Library for Previous: Related Work

Daniel Cabeza Gras
Fri Oct 4 18:56:02 MET DST 1996