Typechecking Uses of the jQuery Language
- Posted by Benjamin Lerner
- on Jan. 17, 2014
Manipulating HTML via JavaScript is often a frustrating task: the APIs for doing so, known as the Document Object Model (or DOM), are annoyingly inconsistent between browsers and too low-level: they amount to an “assembly language for trees”, allowing programmers to navigate from a node to its parent, children or adjacent siblings; add, remove, or modify a node at a time; etc. And like assembly programming, these low-level operations are imperative and often error-prone. Fortunately, developers have created libraries that abstract away from this low-level tedium to provide a powerful, higher-level API. The best-known example of these is jQuery, and its API is so markedly different from the DOM API that it might as well be its own language — a domain-specific language for HTML manipulation.
Every language has its own idiomatic forms, and therefore has its own characteristic failure modes and error cases. Our group has been studying various (sub-)languages of JavaScript— JS itself, ADsafety, private browsing violations— for quite a while, so the natural question to ask is, what can we do to analyze jQuery as a language? We ask programmers merely to define the structure of widgets of their page, and from that we can define a set of types for the jQuery APIs that captures their intended behavior on the developer's s page. No additional programmer effort is needed, and the type errors produced are typically local and pertinent to fixing buggy code.
Further reading
Obviously we have elided many of the nitty-gritty details that make our system work. We have a longer post available on our group's blog that gives an informal tour of our approach. We’ve also written up our full system, with more formal definitions of the types and worked examples of finding errors in buggy queries and successfully typechecking correct ones. The writeup also explains some surprising subtleties of the type environment, and proposes some API enhancements to jQuery that were suggested by difficulties in engineering and using the types we defined.