Slides available on http://asfws12.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/appsec2012_opa.pdf

Alok Menghragani already presented the initial keynote of the conference. This time, he presented us a personal project, not linked in any ways to his current employer. Started in 2008, OPA is an open-source framework designed for being used by companies. Instead of having to learn different technologies for different platforms, all in OPA is in JavaScript, for both the front and the backend systems. On the backend, OPA will rely on node.js while on the client side it will generate HTML and JavaScript for the browser. The most interesting part of the framework is the slicing feature, where OPA detects at compilation time if the code needs to be run on the server side, or on the client, and this without further manual intervention needed. The presentation went along with several examples of this functional language and shows the beauty of it, where no operations such as string concatenation are required.

Update: Alok’s presence at the conference and in Switzerland generated media coverage in the French part of Switzerland, e.g.: