Uniform Approach To Programming The World Wide Web

We propose a uniform model for programming distributed Web applications. The model is based on the concept of Web computation places and provides mechanisms to coordinate distributed computations at these places, including peer-to-peer communication between places and a uniform mechanism to initiate computation in remote places. Computations can interact with the flow of HTTP requests and responses, typically as clients, proxies or servers in the Web architecture. We have implemented the model using the global pointers and remote service requests provided by the Nexus communication library. We present the model and its rationale, with some illustrative examples, and we describe the implementation.