Multi-Tier Functional Reactive Programming for the Web

Abstract

The development of robust and efficient interactive web applications is challenging, because developers have to deal with multiple programming languages, asynchronous events, propagating data and events between clients and servers, data consistency and much more. Several approaches for (partly) addressing these challenges have been proposed. Two relevant ones are (1) multi-tier languages and (2) functional reactive programming (FRP). Multi-tier programming languages support the development of client and server in a single language, and hide much of the complexity related to distribution. FRP offers the right abstractions to make event-driven programming convenient, safe and composable. However, existing web frameworks and programming languages exploit the benefits of both approaches separately, for example by restricting the use of FRP to the client side.