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Programming with Actors pp 3–31Cite as

Parallel and Distributed Web Programming with Actors

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10789))

Abstract

JavaScript is the predominant language when it comes to developing applications for the web. Many of today’s web-based systems are implemented solely in JavaScript due to its applicability to both client and server-side development. Programmers have an ever-growing need to express parallelism due to the computationally intensive nature of modern web applications. Currently, JavaScript tries to satisfy this need through actor-based parallelism constructs. However, we argue that these constructs suffer from design flaws which hamper programmers to elegantly express parallelism in web applications. In this paper we present Spiders.ts, a unified actor framework to express both parallelism and distribution. In Spiders.ts, programmers can easily specify the coarse-grained parallelism needs of modern web applications. Moreover, Spiders.ts’ built-in distribution features allow programmers to express client-to-server, server-to-server and client-to-client communication simply by using actors. Through benchmarks we show that our framework is able to substantially improve the performance of web applications. Moreover, we demonstrate its expressive power by comparing implementations of a distributed case study application.

F. Myter—Funded by Innoviris (the Brussels Institute for Research and Innovation) through the Doctiris program (grant number 15-doct-07).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/myter/Spiders.js.

  2. 2.

    A typed superset of JavaScript which compiles to standard JavaScript.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/myter/Spiders.js/tree/master/CoCode.

  4. 4.

    https://github.com/kriskowal/q-connection.

  5. 5.

    http://www.appcelerator.com.

  6. 6.

    https://github.com/myter/Spiders.js/tree/master/SpiderPong.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, Elsene, Belgium

    Florian Myter & Wolfgang De Meuter

  2. Universiteit Gent, 281 S9, Krijgslaan, Gent, Belgium

    Christophe Scholliers

Authors
  1. Florian Myter
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  2. Christophe Scholliers
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  3. Wolfgang De Meuter
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Florian Myter .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bologna, Cesena, Italy

    Alessandro Ricci

  2. KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

    Philipp Haller

Appendices

A Highlighted Native Implementation of Pong

1.1 A.1 Server Implementation

figure d

1.2 A.2 Server Implementation

figure e

1.3 A.3 Client Implementation

figure f

1.4 A.4 Client Implementation

figure g

1.5 A.5 Client Implementation

figure h

B Highlighted Spiders.ts Implementation of Pong

1.1 B.1 Server Implementation

figure i

1.2 B.2 Client Implementation

figure j

1.3 B.3 Client Implementation

figure k

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Myter, F., Scholliers, C., De Meuter, W. (2018). Parallel and Distributed Web Programming with Actors. In: Ricci, A., Haller, P. (eds) Programming with Actors. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10789. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00302-9_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00302-9_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-00301-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-00302-9

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