Creating Interactive Visualizations of TopHat Programs

TL;DR

This paper introduces TopHat UI, a graphical interface for the TopHat programming language, enhancing usability and formal reasoning capabilities without compromising its formal properties.

Contribution

It presents a fully functional GUI for TopHat, built in Haskell, demonstrating that a TOP framework can be implemented in a different host language while maintaining formal semantics.

Findings

Successfully developed a GUI for TopHat in Haskell

Demonstrated the feasibility of separate UI and semantics implementation

Improved the verifiability and usability of TOP software

Abstract

Many companies and institutions have automated their business process in workflow management software. The novel programming paradigm Task-Oriented Programming (TOP) provides an abstraction for such software. The largest framework based on TOP, iTasks, has been used to develop real-world software. Workflow software often includes critical systems. In such cases it is important to reason over the software to ascertain its correctness. The lack of a formal iTasks semantics makes it unsuitable for formal reasoning. To this end TopHat has been developed as a TOP language with a formal semantics. However, TopHat lacks a graphical user interface (GUI), making it harder to develop practical TopHat systems. In this paper we present TopHat UI. By combining an existing server framework and user interface framework, we have developed a fully functioning proof of concept implementation in Haskell, on top of TopHat's semantics. We show that implementing a TOP framework is possible using a different host language than iTasks uses. None of TopHat's formal properties have been compromised, since the UI framework is completely separate from TopHat. We run several example programs and evaluate their generated GUI. Having such a system improves the quality and verifiability of TOP software in general.