The Web is becoming the richest platform on which to create computer applications. Its power comes from three elements: (1) modern Web browsers enable highly sophisticated GUIs with 3D, multimedia, fancy typesetting, etc.; (2) calling existing services through Web APIs makes it possible to develop sophisticated applications from independently available components; and (3) open data availability allows applications to access a wide set of information that was unreachable or that simply did not exist before. The combination of these three elements has already given birth to revolutionary applications such as Google Maps, radio podcasts, and social networks.
The next step is likely to be incorporating the physical environment into the Web.
The Hop language takes a path, relying on a different idea: incorporating all the required Web-related features into a single language with a single homogeneous development and execution platform, uniformly covering all the aspects of a Web application: client side, server side, communication, and access to third-party resources. Hop embodies and generalizes both HTML and JavaScript functionalities in a Scheme-based3 platform that also provides the user with a fully general algorithmic language. Web services and APIs can be used as easily as standard library functions, whether on the server side or the client side.
