TouchDevelop (www.touchdevelop.com) is a programming environment that provides high-level abstractions to enable the productive creation of scripts on and for touch-based devices that access web services. TouchDevelop has four main components:
1. A statically typed scripting language with novel abstractions to support (a) stateless GUIs with support for live programming and (b) replicated data for collaborative applications;
2. A browser-hosted touch-based integrated development environment that makes it possible to productively create small scripts with a single finger on a variety of devices.
3. A set of high-level APIs to make it easy to access device sensors/resources and web services;
4. A cloud back-end that enables a social approach to software development.
In this talk, I'll first briefly demonstrate TouchDevelop. I'll then dig into the language abstractions and run-time support for live programming and replicated data, as well as the research opportunities opened up by hosting a software environment fully in the cloud.
Thomas Ball (Tom) is a Principal Researcher and Research Manager at Microsoft Research. From 1993-1999, he was at Bell Laboratories, where he made contributions in program visualization and profiling. His 1997 PLDI paper on path profiling with colleagues Ammons and Larus received the PLDI 2007 Most Influential Paper Award. In 1999, Tom moved to Microsoft Research, where he started the SLAM software model checking project with Sriram Rajamani, leading to the Static Driver Verifier (SDV) tool for finding defects in device driver code. A 2001 PLDI paper on SLAM's predicate abstraction procedure for C programs received the PLDI 2011 Most Influential Paper Award. Tom and Sriram received the 2011 CAV Award for SLAM/SDV. Tom is a 2011 ACM Fellow for "contributions to software analysis and defect detection". At Microsoft, he has nurtured research areas such as automated theorem proving, program testing/verification, and empirical software engineering.