Jean-Jacques Dubray is the founder of xgen.io and gliiph. He has been building Service Oriented Architectures, and API platforms for the last 15 years. He is a former member of the research staff at HRL and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Provence (Luminy campus), home of the Prolog language. He is the inventor of the BOLT methodology and the SAM pattern.
In his talk Jean-Jacques Dubray presents that Web Applications are rapidly becoming sophisticated distributed systems. When you look at a Facebook page or a Netflix catalog, the number of components interacting with each other requires complex synchronization and state management capabilities, reaching the limits of the MVC pattern.
In the last couple of years, several reactive architectures have started to get some interest (React, Cycle.js, ELM) without generating significant traction (compared to established frameworks like Angular), while struggling to position effects in their programming model. A new reactive, functional pattern, the State-Action-Model pattern (SAM) was introduced in early 2016 on the foundation of TLA+ semantics.
The pattern, which is unapologetically driven by simplicity, promotes a clear delineation between the business logic and the view and challenges the complexity of frameworks like Google’s Angular or Facebook’s React/Redux.
SAM’s unidirectional flow is also challenging interactive patterns like BFF (Back-End for Front-End) or the Vertical Slice Pattern which suggest creating view-specific APIs, per platform, app, versions of an app…
We’ll start by reviewing some of the key challenges of modern UX and Front-End Architectures. We will then present the key concepts of SAM and walk the audience through some node.js code samples (including server-side TimeTravel).
