Eleven is a programming language for creating reliable, scalable web applications. Applications are expressed in a high-level language with a simple, C-like syntax, from which the Eleven compiler generates complete, ready-to-run implementions in PHP or mod_perl.

Eleven is designed for applications in which rapid development, high performance, and stability are critical - but total control over the look and feel is not (since Eleven generates most of the user interface automatically). Good examples are online exams and surveys, electronic voting, and business workflow applications.

Statesafe architecture

Upon receiving each HTTP request, Eleven applications read their state from a relational database, resume the application until the next web page is generated, save their state to the database, then send the HTTP response to the client. This architecture is called statesafe.

Statesafe applications are reliable, because their entire execution state is checkpointed to the database at every step. Servers can be rebooted or upgraded, or users can reboot their desktop computers - all without disrupting user sessions. At any point, users can log in from a different computer and resume their session from exactly where they left off. Furthermore, application performance can be scaled by replicating the web application servers.

Eleven automates the work of making web applications statesafe, substantially reducing development time and effort over trying to achieve similar goals with traditional web programming languages like PHP and JSP.

In a nutshell, the idea behind Eleven is: Address the problems of application reliability and scalability by reducing them to the more easily solved problem of optimizing database performance.

The Eleven compiler is distributed under the terms of the General Public License.