Abstract:

According to chapter 3 of Abelson & Sussman [1], there are two fundamentally different ways to organise large systems: according to the objects that live in the system, or according to the streams of values that flow through the system. Even though the notions of “object” and “stream” have meanwhile taken many incarnations, the dichotomy still exists in modern programming languages. Marrying reactive programming and OOP is a research endeavour to come up with a unified model that embraces both styles of thinking. We identify two opposing research tracks towards the marriage. Existing work focuses on OO reactive programming, i.e., it uses object technology to compose reactions. Our work explores the converse: in the paper, we present the ROAM (Reactive Objects in AmbientTalk) model which is an experimental framework that explores objects as streams of reactive state.