hyperfiddle.cljc — a Hypermedia Function http://www.hyperfiddle.net/

Hyperfiddle isolates your web clients from I/O, so your code can stay pure. If React.js is managed DOM, Hyperfiddle is managed network and database. This enables a new kind of composable primitive for constructing web software, with paradigm-changing implications.

Dependency coordinates — Todo

[com.hyperfiddle/hyperfiddle "0.0.0"]

Motivation

The hardest part of web dev is I/O: data sync between database, various services, UI and then back to the database. An async, slow, failure-prone concern wired throughout the full stack, and the reason why we all code the same web boilerplate over and over again, year after year.

Hyperfiddle makes data-sync invisible with immutability:

• Fiddle graph captures service inter-dependencies as data (query X depends on queries Y and Z)
• Fiddle graph captures application essense (API, UI, database) as one concern – no frontend/backend dichotemy
• Optimizing I/O runtime – data sync reduces to a graph partitioning problem
• Managed data sync – Userland is not concerned with effects, async, errors or latency
• Transport layer independence – swap transport strategies (e.g. REST, websocket) without changing your app
• Dynamic transport strategies can automatically balance caching and latency
• Platform independence – run on any platform (e.g. browser, Node, mobile) without changing your app

Framework or library? Neither: Hyperfiddle is server infrastructure, like Apache or Nginx. There is a Clojure library for making custom servers (e.g. integrations and control over data sync) and a client library for talking to it.

How does it work?

The Cognitect stack has the right primitives to build "functional" data sync by orienting the entire stack around values and immutability.

• Clojure/CLJC - Value-oriented programming on any platform
• EDN - Extensible notation for values
• Transit - Protocol for value interchange between foreign platforms
• Datomic - Database as a value
• (supplemented with React.js/Reagent)

Hyperfiddle uses the Cognitect stack as a basis to abstract over client/server data sync for APIs, by extending Datomic's immutable semantics to the API. Unlike REST/GraphQL/whatever, Hyperfiddle's data sync composes.

Managed I/O means, as a web dev, you are no longer concerned with remote data fetching or coding HTTP backends. In fact there is hardly any "web programming" left at all. But managed I/O is not the point. The point is: what does managed I/O make possible that wasn't possible before?