SWAC - Sharing a Web Application's Codebase between Server and Client

Authors: Markus Ast, Stefan Wild, Martin Gaedke

Introduction

A Web application's codebase is normally split into a server-side and a client-side with essential functionalities being implemented twice, e.g., validation or rendering. To implement the codebase on the client, JavaScript, HTML and CSS are languages that modern Web browsers can interpret. As the counterpart, the server-side codebase can be implemented by plenty of programming languages, which provide facilities to establish standardized communication interfaces. While recent developments such as Node.js allow using JavaScript as a client-side programming languages outside the browser in a simple and efficient way also on the server-side, they lack offering a common codebase for the entire Web application. The SWAC framework implements a flexible approach to enable sharing of presentation and business logic between server and client using the same codebase. The SWAC framework aims at reducing development efforts and minimizing coding errors, while taking characteristic differences between server and client into account.