The HTML-based platform provides data-management capabilities without needing a back-end server Credit: Sharon Gaudin/IDG Mavo, a tool to turn static HTML into reactive web applications without programming code or a server back end, has just moved to the beta stage. It could be boon for non-programmers looking to get their feet wet in web development. Built at MIT by a team led by computer scientist Lea Verou, the open source Mavo is an HTML-based language that extends HTML syntax to describe web applications that can manage data, with data stored in the cloud, locally, or not at all. Plugins can be used to modify Mavo’s behavior. Mavo is similar to Angular 1.x, the since-superseded version of Google’s JavaScript framework. Both have an HTML-based syntax and support expressions. But Angular was never designed with the goal of writing entirely in HTML; it “treats HTML as a shortcut for data binding to views, but everything else is expected to be written in JavaScript,” according to the Mavo team. Web DevelopmentOpen Source