Declarative Web Applications

CWI Scientific Meeting

Speakers: Steven Pemberton (Distributed and Interactive Systems) and Kees Oosterlee (Scientific Computing)

Time: Friday, January 31, 13.00-14.00h

Location: CWI in Amsterdam - Euler room (Z009) Titles and abstracts are given below.

Sandwiches will be provided before the talks.  We hope to see you there!

13.00-13.30: Steven Pemberton Title: Declarative Web Applications

Abstract: XForms is a web language which, as the name suggests, was originally designed for describing forms on the web. It has a number of unusual properties, such as separation of data and presentation, abstract input-output controls that allow for easy adaptation using style-sheets, and a declarative, invariant-based computation engine. After the release of the initial 1.0 version of XForms, it was quickly realised that with a small amount of generalisation, XForms could also be used to describe more general applications than only forms. And so was born version 1.1. This has since been widely adopted in industry (for instance the KNMI is entirely XForms-based, and XForms is an integral part of the Open Document Format ODF), and allowed us to gain experience in its use. One of the interesting pieces of experience is that you can write applications in XForms at about a tenth of the cost of using a language such as Javascript. This talk will present the essential elements of XForms, and then as an example, develop a mapping application that would otherwise require thousands of lines of Javascript.

13.30-14.00: Kees Oosterlee Title: Forward – Backward, the Swinging Aspects of our Work

Abstract: In this presentation we explain how efficient numerical mathematics techniques, that proceed forward and backward in time, can be used in the context of pricing financial option products and of modern risk management at financial institutions. In particular, we discuss some changes that have taken place due to the financial crisis.