DynaWeb vs. MAWL

• DynaWeb is in Perl. MAWL is in SMLNJ.
  • Perl is weakly typed. SMLNJ is strongly typed. Probably, perl is easier to use for small projects and prototyping. SMLNJ for large (multi-person) projects. (See philosophy).
  • DynaWeb is good for exploration of what you actually want to do. MAWL, probably, for implementation from a spec.
  • Perl has spectacularly powerful string search and replace operators.

• DynaWeb gives persistent state information in the URL. A user can store a URL in a bookmark file, and come back years later to continue a session where he or she left off. The user can also finish a session multiple times in multiple ways from a remembered intermediate point.

  MAWL gives out a magic cookie as a URL, and will throw it away eventually. Storing an intermediate point and restarting is not a well-defined operation.

• MAWL is good at organizing sessions that require long sequences of dissimilar screens. DynaWeb is aimed at short sequences of screens, or many closely related screens (e.g. alternate views of the same data).
• Perl can be slow - expect a good fraction of a sec to produce a page.