Building Server-Side Web Language Processors (Commentary)

 

When talking about web programming and same ol' regular software programming, there are a lot of details to take into account. It is only natural to think that same principle applies when talking about the compilers and their attributes for each of these particular jobs. 

First of all, web applications are significantly more vulnerable to security attacks, particularily those involving string management. Cross-site scripting, and SQL injections were big names back in the day before people thought about removing certain characters from inputs, or blocking them entirely. Even though some of these problems could be perfectly dealt with in the development stage, developers won't make a mistake we don't allow them to make form the start.

Then there's the matter of the Web itself. Server, clients, and requests are central elementes of Web application development. A compiler for web-focused languages should be fundamentally concerned with the management of these three aspects, specially when they are being created for the server side of the equation. 

Last, but not least (though, a bit periferal) is modularity. A web-based compiler should be light enough to be inserted in markup language templates (HTML based pages,  XML documents, etc.), either as a series of tags, or even as a single tag. This could also mean that our web-based compiler could work alongside already established, widely used net frameworks.