hyperfiddle/photon: a streaming Clojure dialect specialized for fullstack UI

Write a full-stack program, and have a compiler distribute it across the client/server boundary.

Photon is a streaming, multi-tier programming language specialized for full-stack web UI, implemented as a Clojure/Script macro. Unlike existing web technologies like React/Relay/GraphQL that treat frontend and backend separately, Photon reunites frontend & backend into a single coherent reactive expression. Imagine React.js but full stack: incremental view maintenance all the way from database views to DOM views, as one streaming computation.

• Never think about frontend/backend web plumbing ever again. Photon solves frontend/backend data fetching the way the JVM solves memory management: by building it into the programming language. Managed network means your frontend can call remote backend functions arbitrarily, as if they are local (and without incurring client-server round trips like promises/RPC).
• Strong composition across the backend/frontend divide. Photon applies pure functional programming to achieve strong, referentially transparent, lambda composition across a streaming distributed system, with the high-level expressive power of Clojure. Write your application logic as a Clojure/Script lambda expression and let the Photon compiler distribute the expression arbitrarily.
• UI as an Expression. Photon was designed to meet the demanding I/O requirements of Hyperfiddle, an open-source low-code platform for operational business applications, designed to scale to the most complex and messy real-world requirements of growth stage businesses. Hyperfiddle is (will be) thin managed tooling on top of "HFQL", a declarative Clojure/Script DSL for live-coding streaming database applications. HFQL can already express complete full-stack CRUD apps in a 20 LOC single file, and through Photon, achieves arbitrary client/server network communication you need to meet arbitrary business requirements.

In this talk, we will livecode a CRUD app with HFQL, demonstrate Photon, and explain how it all works.

Speaker:
Dustin Getz, CEO Hyperfiddle, Philadelphia
https://www.hyperfiddle.net/