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Oni is a framework for managing the control flow of concurrent applications. There are two central ideas to Oni: To make concurrent actions composable by implementing 'pseudo-sequential' control structures with which asynchronous actions can be choreographed in the same way in which traditional sequential control structures are used to choreograph conventional synchronous actions. Ok, I'm not sure I even understand that myself. But please read on anyway :-) To leverage the facilities of a "host language" rather than implement a complete programming language from scratch. Oni can be implemented as a set of functions ("Oni operators") in a suitable host language, such as JavaScript or C++ (any reasonable language will do). Our current implementation, dubbed Oni/JS, is in JavaScript, targeted at in-browser use (should work in any modern browser - FF, Chrome, Safari, IE, ...). Oni requires no preprocessing or precompilation; an Oni program is a just an expression in the host language.

This is misleading because JavaScript has more in common with functional languages like Lisp or Scheme than with C or Java.

It has arrays instead of lists and objects instead of property lists. Functions are first class. It has closures. You get lambdas without having to balance all those parens.

This article presents a JavaScript component which renders a tree on the screen using VML (Vector Markup Language) in Internet Explorer 6+ or the <canvas> element in Firefox 1.5+.