Towards Distributed Reactive Programming

Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Conference on Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages &Amp; Applications

Mogk

et al. 2014

Self Cite

Reactive programming improves the design of reactive applications by relocating the logic for managing dependencies between dependent values away from the application logic to the language implementation. Many distributed applications are reactive. Yet, existing change propagation algorithms are not suitable in a distributed setting.We propose Distributed REScala, a reactive language with a change propagation algorithm that works without centralized knowledge about the topology of the dependency structure among reactive values and avoids unnecessary propagation of changes, while retaining safety guarantees (glitch freedom). Distributed REScala enables distributed reactive programming, bringing the benefits of reactive programming to distributed applications. We demonstrate the enabled design improvements by a case study. We also empirically evaluate the performance of our algorithm in comparison to other algorithms in a simulated distributed setting.

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Distributed REScala

Drechsler

Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Conference on Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages &Amp; Applications

Mogk

et al. 2014

Self Cite

“…Bidirectional constraints are allowed and in case not all constraints can be satisfied, a priority rank is applied [13]. Current research directions include RP in the distributed setting [39] and integration with the OO paradigm [41].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

An empirical study on program comprehension with reactive programming

Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering

Amann

Proksch

et al. 2014

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Starting from the first investigations with strictly functional languages, reactive programming has been proposed as THE programming paradigm for reactive applications. The advantages of designs based on this style over designs based on the Observer design pattern have been studied for a long time. Over the years, researchers have enriched reactive languages with more powerful abstractions, embedded these abstractions into mainstream languages -including object-oriented languages -and applied reactive programming to several domains, like GUIs, animations, Web applications, robotics, and sensor networks.However, an important assumption behind this line of researchthat, beside other advantages, reactive programming makes a wide class of otherwise cumbersome applications more comprehensible -has never been evaluated. In this paper, we present the design and the results of the first empirical study that evaluates the effect of reactive programming on comprehensibility compared to the traditional object-oriented style with the Observer design pattern. Results confirm the conjecture that comprehensibility is enhanced by reactive programming. In the experiment, the reactive programming group significantly outperforms the other group.

“…The need for DRP with consistency guarantees has been widely recognized in literature [28,1,35]. Similarly, the integration of reactive and object-oriented programming have been discussed in [37].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite many reactive applications are intrinsically distributed (e.g., Web applications, monitoring applications, mobile applications) and despite the benefits of reactive programming in distributed settings have been recognized in the literature [35,1,28], most existing solutions for reactive programming do not support distribution [1]. Furthermore, the problem of defining suitable properties and consistency guarantees for the propagation of changes (e.g., to avoid glitches) has received little or no attention in distributed implementations [1,28].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

We have a DREAM

Margara

Proceedings of the 8th ACM International Conference on Distributed Event-Based Systems

2014

Self Cite

The reactive programming paradigm has been proposed to simplify the development of reactive systems. It relies on programming primitives to express dependencies between data items and on runtime/middleware support for automated propagation of changes. Despite this paradigm is receiving increasing attention, defining the precise semantics and the consistency guarantees for reactive programming in distributed environments is an open research problem.This paper targets such problem by studying the consistency guarantees for the propagation of changes in a distributed reactive system. In particular, it introduces three propagation semantics, namely causal, glitch free, and atomic, providing different trade-offs between costs and guarantees. Furthermore, it describes how these semantics are concretely implemented in a Distributed REActice Middleware (DREAM), which exploits a distributed event-based dispatching system to propagate changes.We compare the performance of DREAM in a wide range of scenarios. This allows us to study the overhead introduced by the different semantics in terms of network traffic and propagation delay and to assess the efficiency of DREAM in supporting distributed reactive systems.