Orca: A Single-Language Web Framework for Collaborative Development

In the last few years, the Web has been established as a platform for interactive applications. However, creating Web applications involves numerous challenges since the Web has been created to serve static content. In particular, the separation of the client- and the server-side, being only connected through the unidirectional Hypertext Transfer Protocol, forces developers to apply two programming languages including different libraries, conventions, and tools. Developers create expert knowledge by specializing on a few of all involved technologies. Consequently, the diverse knowledge of team members makes collaboration in Web development laboriously. We present the Orca framework that allows developers to work collaboratively on client-server applications in a single object-oriented programming language. Based on the Smalltalk programming language, full access to existing libraries, and a bidirectional messaging abstraction, Orca provides a consistent environment that supports common idioms and patterns in client- and server-side code. It reduces expert knowledge and the number of development tools and, thus, facilitates the collaboration of Web developers.