Djnn/Smala: A Conceptual Framework and a Language for Interaction-Oriented Programming

The persistent difficulty to develop and maintain interactive software has unveiled the inadequacy of traditional imperative programming languages. In the recent years, several solutions have been proposed to enrich the existing languages with constructs dedicated to interaction. In this paper, we propose a different approach that takes interaction as the primary concern to build a new programming language. We present Djnn, a conceptual framework based on the concepts of process and process activation, then we introduce Smala a programming language derived from this framework. We propose a solution for the unification of the concepts of event and data-flow, and for the derivation of complex control structures from a small set of basic ones. We detail the syntax and the semantics of Smala. Finally, we illustrate through a real-size application how it enables building all parts of an interactive software. Djnn and Smala may offer designers and programmers usable means to think of interactions and translate them into running code.