GOTO is a vendor independent international software development conference with more that 90 top speaker and 1300 attendees. The conference cover topics such as .Net, Java, Open Source, Agile, Architecture and Design, Web, Cloud, New Languages and Processes

David Nolen, Software Engineer at Cognitect

David Nolen

Biography: David Nolen

David Nolen is a software engineer for Cognitect. He enjoys making music, writing JavaScript, writing ClojureScript, and exploring new approaches to user interface programming.

Twitter: @swannodette

Presentation: The Functional Final Frontier

Time: Wednesday 15:10 - 16:00 / Location: Gold Coast

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 strangehold 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.