Elm – A Robust Front-End Programming Language,for Dynamic Application Development

By now everyone would have probably been aware of static and dynamic web applications. Still, let’s have a small overview on this before proceeding to our core topic. For simple business requirements, static websites may be sufficient where, it contains unalterable HTML pages. On contrary, the dynamic websites see constant up dates with changing requirements.

One can face a lot of challenges while updating dynamic applications, also the first segment to experience these changes is the model of an application state. So, similarly a new front-end programming language is being recommended for building dynamic web applications, but why?

Elm

A programming language, Elm is highly functional and is used for dealing with front-end development. In other words, developers are given a shield to face the troublesome HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which are considered the face of front-end development. Dynamic web applications are all about the progressing complexity and not the other way around. Run on a browser, Elm offers various advantages making it worthy enough to deal with dynamic web applications.

• Functional– Yes, Elm is highly functional, with no state to bother. Whatever the value is being assigned to a function at the input, the same stuff can be expected at the output.
• Reactive– It is a programming paradigm that revolves around the data flows and extent of changes that happen. Here a reactive cycle will be created once the UI defined function is included into the stream of updates.
• Typed– The word resiliency will be definitely accepted by the developers because of this feature. Elm is a strongly typed language as it supports static typing and other ML inspired languages.
• Compilation to JavaScript– It was previously mentioned that Elm runs on a browser, which is possible because of this action.

Architecture

How will you feel when you get your hands on the best functional programming language, think how will your browser perform? Unthinkable, but it is possible through Elm. Functional complexity is a known fact in dynamic applications, so let us analyze the Elm architecture in detail.

The architecture is mainly segmented into three sectors, namely Model, Update, and View.

• Model– It defines the state of an application, to be more precise, the Model in elm is a record that expounds the structure of data on which the application performs. A simple example may shed more light on this concept. Consider a subject, a ball with X and Y coordinates and where its circumference is to be defined, then,

type alias Model = { x : Float, y : Float, circumference: Float }

• Update– Interactive elements of an application are well supported in this section of architecture. For all the possible actions, elm makes use of “union type” to define them. Suppose you take an object which rotates, bounces and slides, then the Action type will be

type Action = Slide | Rotate | Bounce | Noop

Here for each action a new state is built, without modifying the previous state. This will not be burdensome for the developers as Elm offers compact syntax for the same.

• View- How will you view the current state of your application? Well, this portion deals with that subject. Each one of the logic is defined about how an application changes action and gets updated, now, with a simple declaration, the view will be defined.

On the whole, Elm is redefining the development process of dynamic applications. Compliers are easier to deal with under Elm; hence developers will have an error-free approach, which can be a big push for them.