Associate Professor Shriram Krishnamurthi and his team of developers have created a new programming language for developing Web applications. Known as Flapjax, the technology was released under the BSD open-source license this week. Designed as an AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) offshoot, Flapjax runs on traditional Web browsers and requires no plug-ins or additional downloads.

Krishnamurthi hopes that Flapjax's key attributes will appeal to developers: It is event-driven and reactive; its template system reduces unnecessary code; it enables sharing of data and provides a persistent store that automatically updates all clients sharing data; it implements access control to channel ...