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Shashi Gowda - UIs as Values

151 views · Published 23 April 2015 · 17:45 · Indexed 6 November 2026

Channel: Hasgeek TV · 2015 · Science & Technology

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This talk aims to dwell on the benefits of representing UIs as values. We take the key contribution of Facebook’s React framework - the idea of Virtual DOM and DOM Reconciliation and push it as far as it can seemingly go.
In no small part does Facebook’s React framework owe its popularity to its magical ease – it provides a declarative way of describing UIs, and blazing fast performance for free. Good performance in this programming model is feasible because of a key design tenet of React called DOM Reconciliation. In short, React does not mutate or create the actual DOM (for that is expensive and full of peril), instead it creates a representation of the DOM (which is called the Virtual DOM) at every app state, and then applies only the differences that need to be applied to the actual DOM.

In this talk, we will explore what designing and programming UIs with such a Virtual DOM representation entails. We extend the Virtual DOM idea to the server-side and represent complex UIs as denotations tied to their Web Component counterparts. This combination makes it easy to compose data-driven UIs from smaller reusable parts. We will also see examples of these ideas manifesting in the Elm ecosystem and some Julia UI packages (namely Interact, Patchwork, and Canvas)

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