Prototyping Electronic Commerce Systems Using Esterel

In this article I present the advantages of using the synchronous programming language Esterel to prototype electronic commerce systems. I first outline a technique to model HTML tags, which is then specialized to document types. A simple example illustrates the coding ideas for both the static and dynamic aspects of behavior. This is then extended to handle certain other features found in electronic commerce systems. I also show how the Esterel environment can be used to formally verify certain properties.