Talk: 17:10-17:55 (English)
Local-first Distributed Applications with REScala
Local-first software is a new term for interactive end-user applications, which provide data ownership and privacy while still enabling data to be shared, and which allow working offline while ensuring data consistency. Developing such applications is often perceived as hard, because of the use of unsuited general purpose programming models. REScala is a mature research project that addresses these issues and provides a specialized programming model designed to be understandable by developers while still providing the flexibility for efficient implementations that automatically ensure all desired properties.
In this talk, we will show how a combination of functional reactive programming (the mostly classical variant) and conflict-free replicated data types (specifically join semilattices) provide abstract reasoning about all points in space and time for local-first applications. Specifically why reasoning in the abstract is actually much easier for developers than reasoning about all the hundreds and thousands of possible special cases their implementation admits.
We hope that this talk helps to spread such better suited programming models, thus leading to most software being local-first by default. Then, we may see a future where individuals own their data and not have it stolen by advertisers, and companies keep their sovereignty without being at the mercy of the biggest players.
Ragnar Mogk
Ragnar Mogk has been the technical lead of the REScala project at the Technical University of Darmstadt since working on his master thesis in 2014. In his time as a PhD student, working on programming languages for distributed and concurrent systems, he realized that his private interest for personal data ownership aligns perfectly with commercial interest of most companies (except for a couple of very large ones). Given this insight, Ragnar completed his PhD in 2021 and is now contributing to the academic and industrial communities that are tackling these problems.
