Api's and FP: BFF's

Conveners

Onorio Catenacci (@OldDutchCap)

Chris Roland (@ChrisRoland)

Attendees

Kevin Swiber (@KevinSwiber)

Adrian

Carlos

Tony

Stefan

Dmitri

Notes

• We started by discussing which functional languages all of us are working/playing with

  F#

  Erlang

  Clojure

  Elixir

• No state

  The idea of coding without state maps more nicely to the FP paradigm than the OO paradigm.

  Try to push the management of state to a higher level

  We need a good way to model the finite state machine. FP provides this good way.

  OO seems to encourage thinking in terms of hanging on to state

• Idempotent

• Resources as actors

  • What is the actor model?

    • Carl Hewitt on Actors: http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Hewitt-Meijer-and-Szyperski-The-Actor-Model-everything-you-wanted-to-know-but-were-afraid-to-ask

    • Properties of actors

      • Actors are addressable (Resources are addressable)

      • Therefore seems like there should be a good mapping here.

      • Erlang processes are actors.

      • Actors carry some sort of internal state. Actor can be thought of as state machine.

      • Discussion of investigating mapping resources to actors. If anyone is interested in pursuing this, contact @KevinSwiber

  • How can we insure that everything happens in the order it needs to happen in?

    • This is a basic issue with all async programming.

• Custom routing patterns map nicely to FP pattern matching / destructuring forms

• Is Hypermedia a good fit for FP? Yes, we feel that it is a good match.

• Discussion of pagination vs. side-effect free functions.

  • When discussing hypermedia we need to be careful about whether we're discussing client side or server side

  • How do we maintain state on the server side with FP?

  • Easier to think of pagination via the mental model of thinking about pages in a book.

  • Discussing using Reactive Extensions as a potential solution to pagination issue.