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Web applications with Julia

On the Rise

Article from ADMIN 85/2025

By Lee Phillips

The technical programming language Julia is fast becoming a favorite with scientists and engineers of all stripes, but it is also well suited to form the backbone of interactive websites that explain these science and engineering concepts.

Julia [1] is a high-level, high-performance, general-purpose programming language. The "high level" refers to its expressive syntax, advanced data structures, and sophisticated type system, which are features that allow the programmer to solve complex problems with compact, readable programs [2]. High performance is achieved with a unique just-in-time compilation system that turns high-level code into native machine instructions on any of Julia's many supported architectures, including GPUs. Julia is a general-purpose language because it's convenient to use in any problem domain. The only areas in which Julia might not be an ideal choice, because of the overhead of compiling, are embedded and real-time applications (although even this may change [3] in the future).

Julia was originally envisioned as a new language [4] for scientific and technical computing. Since its relatively recent public release in 2012, its unique melding of advanced concepts in language design with uncompromised performance has led to rapid and enthusiastic adoption across many science and engineering disciplines. It's one of only four languages [5] that have been deployed on supercomputers for petaflop computations (the others are Fortran, C, and C++).

Because of the emphasis on technical computing in the Julia community, most of the books [6] and online documentation and tutorials are aimed at scientists and engineers who are interested in using the language for simulation, data analysis, and visualization of results; this is certainly true of my own book [7], for example. However, Julia is an

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