Distributed Systems Development with Multitier Reactive Programming

传统上，分布式应用程序是使用分布式系统中每个组件的单独模块开发的，通常使用不同的编程语言。这些模块对诸如用户输入或来自网络的消息之类的事件做出反应，并且可以进而产生由其他模块处理的新事件。分层通常是有问题的：组合模块是出了名的困难，需要大量耗时的集成测试。通信的手动实现也是一个问题：开发人员被迫在主机之间编程复杂的基于事件的通信方案-这通常是一种低级别且容易出错的活动。两者的结合使事情变得更糟：分布式的基于事件的数据流分散在多个模块中，这使得很难从整体上对系统进行推理。由于这些原因，尽管大多数软件是分布式的，分布式系统的设计和开发仍然令人惊讶的挑战。在这个项目中，我们提出了我们的路线图，通过专门的编程语言支持攻击开发分布式应用程序的复杂性。我们的愿景是，基于多层方法的方法可以提供一个连贯的模型来推理分散在多个模块中的数据流，通过专用语言功能支持多个软件架构，并抽象出低级别的细节，如主机间通信和数据转换。预期的影响是，我们的解决方案可以显着减少开发和维护分布式应用程序的工作，自动生成容易出错的代码，否则将手动编写，增强早期检测的错误，并引入方法，轻松地迁移应用程序在不同的平台和通信机制。

Distributed applications are traditionally developed using separate modules for each component in the distributed system, often using different programming languages. These modules react to events such as user input or messages from the network and may in turn produce new events handled by other modules. Separation into tiers is often problematic: combining modules is notoriously hard and requires extensive and time consuming integration tests. Manual implementation of communication is also an issue: developers are forced to program complex event-based communication schemes among hosts - an activity which is often low level and error prone. The combination of the two makes things even worse: distributed event-based data flow is scattered among multiple modules, which makes it hard to reason about the system as a whole. For these reasons, despite most software is today distributed, the design and development of distributed systems remains surprisingly challenging.In this project, we present our roadmap for attacking the complexity of developing distributed applications via specialized programming language support. Our vision is that methods based on a multitier approach can provide a coherent model to reason about data flows otherwise scattered across multiple modules, support multiple software architectures through dedicated language features, and abstract over low level details such as inter-host communication and data conversions. The expected impact is that our solution can significantly reduce the effort of developing and maintaining distributed applications, automat- ically generating error prone code that would be otherwise manually written, enhancing early detection of bugs, and introducing means to easily migrate applications among different platforms and communication mechanisms.