Preface
Modern web applications represent the new way to write software. Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia are some well-known examples of such applications. They run on servers, and users can access them with a browser via either desktop or mobile devices. We refer to these as “modern” applications because they combine a rich user interface with real-time interaction and the capability to connect with online services, among other capabilities.
Opa is a programming framework for JavaScript that enables you to easily write modern web applications that have all the aforementioned cool features. This book is a gentle introduction to Opa.
What Is Opa?
Traditionally, many different technologies and languages are involved when writing web applications. Not so with Opa! Opa is the only technology you need to know to write the code that runs on the client (in the browser) and the code that runs on the server, including database queries.
Opa natively supports the web platform, which is a set of technologies that includes HTML5 and CSS, and it automates many aspects of modern web application programming: Ajax/Comet client/server communication, event-driven and nonblocking code transformations, etc.
One of the main distinctive features of Opa is strong static typing, with type inference. This means that every application you write is checked by a program called a typechecker that automatically tracks inconsistencies in the application. Typing enables Opa programmers to debug applications quickly, ...
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