Reactive Sheets: an intuitive approach to functional‐reactive computing

Enzo Alda, Monica Figuera, Juan Andrés Escalante, Richard Lares Mejías
C◦mp◦se :: Conference
May 18, 2017

As the world experiences an exponential growth in the amount of generated real-time data, it is not surprising that reactive computing services, like AWS Lambda, as well as stream processing frameworks, like Apache Storm and Apache Kafka, are becoming increasingly popular. The IT world has been consistently shifting from a request-response paradigm to one of continuous data processing pipelines. Moreover, data rates, volumes, and latency requirements keep getting more stringent, as vendors compete to deliver a better consumer experience.

This talk will first provide some general insights about the theoretical foundations of functional programming, stream processing, and reactive computing. Then, after briefly mentioning some enabling technologies and popular technology stacks, which make possible to build advanced event processing pipelines, the talk will introduce a simple, yet powerful, approach for modeling reactive computations.

The presentation will conclude with a live demonstration of a Web-enabled functional reactive system, showcasing the use of higher order functions to perform real-time calculations and screen rendering transformations over high rate data streams.