Opinionated Framework for Building Reactive Services for Web Development

What is it about?

We present an opinionated framework for developing reactive services for web development. Reactive programming is a software development paradigm that focuses on asynchronous data streams and is often used in front-end programming for building user interfaces. However, there is a gap between the reactive user interface and the necessary server-side services, making it difficult to build front-ends in a reactive functional approach. Our framework serves as an alternative to existing technologies like REST and JSON-RPC and can bridge this gap, allowing for the straightforward development of reactive services. Our framework offers new protocols and models that extend the basic REST and JSON-RPC models and includes a reference implementation to demonstrate its viability. The server-side of the framework was written in the Xtend language, and the client libraries were written using Xtend and Typescript. We argue that this framework has several benefits for reactive applications, including improved code abstraction, higher throughput with lower resource usage, and more predictable behavior under heavy load or in a fail status. Reactive applications are designed to be responsive, meaning that any change in a component, whether it is due to user input or external information, should be immediately propagated to other components. This allows the user to be constantly aware of the status of their data, even when the application is under heavy load or experiencing a failure. We argue that reactive services are particularly well-suited for complex services that require calling other services in a chain of dependencies. In this scenario, if you had to wait for the result before sending the next request, the application would be less responsive. We also discuss the importance of scalability in reactive services and propose a model for building scalable reactive services. We argue that this model can help to reduce the complexity of building reactive services, as it allows developers to focus on business logic rather than implementation details. We provide a case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and show that it can be used to build scalable and responsive reactive services. Overall, our work presents a novel framework for building reactive services that can improve the responsiveness and scalability of web applications. It offers new protocols and models that extend existing technologies like REST and JSON-RPC and provides a reference implementation to demonstrate its viability. Our framework may be of interest to researchers and practitioners working in the field of web development and reactive programming.

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Photo by Fotis Fotopoulos on Unsplash

Photo by Fotis Fotopoulos on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This work is important because it addresses a gap in current technologies for building reactive services in web development. Reactive programming is a popular paradigm for building user interfaces, but there is currently a lack of frameworks that enable the straightforward development of reactive services to support these interfaces. The proposed framework in this work fills this gap by offering new protocols and models that extend the basic REST and JSON-RPC models and providing a reference implementation to demonstrate its viability. One of the unique aspects of this work is the focus on building scalable reactive services. The authors propose a model for building scalable reactive services and provide a case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of their approach. This is timely as the demand for scalable web applications continues to grow. By offering a solution for building scalable reactive services, this work has the potential to make a significant impact on the field of web development. Overall, this work presents a novel and timely solution for building reactive services in web development. Its focus on scalability and the inclusion of a reference implementation make it stand out from other approaches and may make it of particular interest to researchers and practitioners working in this field.

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