UI: The Functional Final Frontier

The Model-View-Controller (MVC) approach to user interfaces was first proposed by Trygve Reenskaug in a 1979 Xerox PARC note. As Object Oriented methodologies gained popularity, MVC too gained traction as a natural and logical way to construct user interfaces despite obvious short comings. Even though OO researchers moved forward with alternative approaches likes Morphic and constraint based systems, MVC today maintains a stranglehold on developer approaches to UI.

Can functional programming take the good lessons from MVC while advancing the state of the art? Functional Reactive Programming and its derivates primarily solve complexities around events - what of component modularity and abstraction?

We'll examine how a new library for ClojureScript called Om, a simple functional layer over Facebook's React, makes some traditional hard problems in MVC based UIs simple without abandoning the abtractions OO programmers find useful. These concepts are easily portable to other systems provided the presence of persistent data structures.