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Windows & .NET Watch: Chain reactive


By Larry O'Brien
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October 1, 2009 —  (Page 1 of 2)
An interactive program is one in which the program pulls input from the environment: System.Console.ReadKey(). A reactive program is one in which (after an initial wiring-up) the environment pushes input to the program: myKeyPressEventHandler(Object sender, KeyPressEventArgs e) { … etc … }. Today, most programmers mostly write reactive programs.

The reactive style is a good fit for programs that wish to remain active while waiting for a particular input event (e.g., fire other events relating to the cursor position, repaint the screen, update a graphic, etc.). In other words, it’s a good fit for applications with GUIs and for Web pages seeking that AJAX-y goodness. (“Functional reactive programming” is more mathematically rigorous and involves not just events but continuously varying valuables; we can leave it aside for this discussion.)

The reactive style requires more setup, but it allows for the program to more easily do other things while waiting for a particular input event. The success of AJAX is testament to the perceived benefits of the reactive style. It combines JavaScript’s event-handling mechanism with the extraordinarily slow callback mechanism that is a Web query, but nonetheless applications written with AJAX are generally seen by users as more responsive because they don’t involve a whole-page refresh.

While the market has voted in favor of the end result of the reactive style, the plumbing beneath such a Web-based application is a mess. Such applications are very likely running JavaScript to dynamically power the UI, a server-side language such as C# to describe the business logic, and SQL to describe its persistence model.

Even if you put the programming language aside, the data models at hand are confusing. The display inside the browser is based on a Document Object Model. Complex data flowing over the Web is in another hierarchical text-based format, either XML or JSON. Business logic running at the server is likely to be working with a directed graph of objects. Persistence, for most of us, is a combination of filesystem objects (for “mere” content and configuration) and relational data described with SQL.



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