Distributed Systems Development with Multitier Reactive Programming

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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.