ReDOOP: Reactive Design for Object Oriented Programming

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Guido Salvaneschi
• Subject Area: Software Engineering and Programming Languages
• Term: from 2016 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 322196540

Reactive applications are difficult to implement. Traditional solutions, based on event systems and the Observer design pattern, are known to be cumbersome but programmers bear them in return for the benefits of OO design. On the other hand, reactive languages based on automatic updates of dependencies - like functional reactive programming and dataflow languages - provide undoubted advantages but do not fit well with the OO model and mutable state. This project aims to support reactive applications in the OO setting. Our goal is to develop a new programming model that encompasses language abstractions for reactive programming and OO features available in mainstream languages, such as inheritance, late binding, encapsulation, imperative state updates, language-level support for event filtering and event correlation. After showing the flaws of the existing solutions, we highlight the potential of reactive languages and formulate our research plan.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants