Mawl:a Domain-specific Language for Form-based Services

(Title originally was Experience with a Domain Specific Language for Form-Based Services) This paper describes our experience with mawl's form abstraction, which is the means for separating application logic and user interface descriptions. The initial impetus for the form abstraction was to simplify the creation and maintenance of dynamic web services based on the Common Gateway Interface (CGI). In particular, mawl was constructed to provide certain compile-time guarantees about the behavior of web servcies, as well as platform independence by hiding the details of CGI programming in language abstractions.