Scala Multi-Tier FRP

We focus, firstly, on Functional Reactive Programming (FRP), which allows us to declaratively model the asynchronous user and client-server communication and, secondly, on multi-tier programming languages and frameworks, which remove the gap between client and server code.

Current web frameworks exploit the benefits of both approaches separately, but important additional benefits can be obtained from a deep integration of both ideas. We propose Multi-tier FRP for the Web, a novel way of writing web applications where the FRP network spans client and server.

For more details please refer to this paper: 'Multi-tier Functional Reactive Programming for the Web'

Try it out!

Please note that this README describes a way to get our proof-of-concept implementation running for experimentation. Because it uses unstable versions of some libraries and the libraries have changed since the implementation, this README describes downloading old versions from github for those libraries. We have verified that this procedure works for a user with a fresh scala install on our system, but this is hard to guarantee. We hope to develop our implementation further in the future, particularly make it depend on more stable (versions of) libraries.

Install SBT

Please follow the install guide on the official scala-sbt.org website.

Install LMS

git clone https://github.com/TiarkRompf/virtualization-lms-core.git
cd virtualization-lms-core
git checkout a6ae135
sbt publish-local
cd ..

Install JS-Scala

git clone https://github.com/js-scala/js-scala.git
cd js-scala
git checkout 0b5771853a35a37d011f0ddebf770fdcd7fc8bc1
sbt publish-local
cd ..

Install Hokko

git clone https://github.com/Tzbob/s-frp.git
cd s-frp
git checkout 3cbd1769b8933c15ceb28a96
sbt "project sfrpJVM" publish-local
cd ..

Run the examples

git clone https://github.com/Tzbob/s-mt-frp.git
cd s-mt-frp
git checkout pldi15
sbt "project examples" run

The 'Demo' object contains the bootstrapping code for the following examples:

• the Echo program is available at http://localhost:8080/echo,
• the BasicChat program is available at http://localhost:8080/basicchat,
• the Chat program is available at http://localhost:8080/chat,
• the TestGlitches program is available at http://localhost:8080/glitches,
• the CounterBenchmark program is available at http://localhost:8080/bench,
• the DatabaseBenchmark program is available at http://localhost:8080/dbbench.

Layout

The repository is split into examples and core containing demo and framework code.

Examples

"smtfrp/examples" contains some small demo applications;

• TestGlitches demonstrates our glitch prevention when combining multiple external FRP networks,
• EchoProg is the simplest example, a message is taken to the server anonymously and broadcasted to all connections,
• BasicChatProg is a simple implementation of a chat application that shows improved networking performance using incremental behaviors,
• Demo demonstrates how a program written using our DSL is made available,
• ... we have plenty of other small examples, some which use the database API and some that demonstrate our use of incremental behaviors.

Core

You should look at "core/src/main/scala/mtfrp" when navigating through core, you will find three packages:

• lang: the DSL definitions for our multi-tier FRP language are located here e.g. MtFrpProg
• exp: contains the implementations of our DSL definition in the LMS way e.g. MtFrpProgExp
• gen: contains the JavaScript generators for all our implementatinons e.g. GenMtFrpProg