The Design of and Case for KRL

Tuesday – Session 3 - O

Convener: Phil Windley

Notes-taker(s): Phil Windley

A. Tags for the session - technology discussed/ideas considered:

B. Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:

The location metaphor that is often used to describe the Web lead to siloed Web sites. But people what to achieve a purpose, not go somewhere when they are online.

Building Internet apps that respond to complex event scenarios and use multiple APIs with diverse authorization schemes places an unscalable burden on developers.

Architectures and APIs help, but do not go far enough. When computer science has faced similar problems we have built notations--programming languages. Programming languages can wrap the architecture and APIs in a syntactic and semantic layer that provides significant mental leverage for the developer via the abstraction.

KRL is a rule-based language for describing reactive systems. At KRL's core is a complex event expression language. KRL has a full featured expression language that includes primitives for interacting with OAuth authenticated data sources. Rule actions depend on the target domain. For the web actions can modify the DOM.

Using KRL, developers can easily create apps that combine and remix data from multiple Web sites and superimpose the results onto any other.