Abstract

Despite the World Wide Web recent architectural formalization in terms of Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style and Resource-Oriented Architecture (ROA), current languages and tools for Web programming generally suffer from a lack of understanding of its design constraints and from an abstraction mismatch that makes it difficult to fully exploit the Web potential. Based on the insights gained by REST and ROA, we claim that logic languages are well-suited for promoting the Web architecture and principles: in particular, the straightforward mapping of REST and ROA abstractions onto elements of Contextual Logic Programming allows for directly executable logic-based resource representations, as well as dynamic modification of resource behaviour at runtime. Along this line, in this paper we present Web Logic Programming as a Prolog-based language for the World Wide Web embedding the core REST and ROA principles, intended to work as the basis of a framework for the rapid prototyping of Web applications. We define the language operational semantics and discuss some simple but significant programming examples.