Sunday, December 22, 2013

How Haskell can solve the integration problem

Will show how long running tasks, Web apps, workflows, EAI Orchestration and BPM applications share the same underlying problem: The "integration problem", that only haskell can solve with more simplicity, generality and maintainability

Creating a single application in the imperative style is easy and intuitive, because the programmer is in control of the sequence of things to do. But when it comes the time to integrate two or more autonomous entities that send events at any time in its own sequence then is when the programmer is not in control, so a different programming model is necessary. Such problem happens when trying to integrate the users with backoffice applications via web applications, but also when it is necessary to integrate two or more backoffice applications, company departments, web sites, web services etc.

The standard model that solves this inversion of control problem has various names but esenstially is the same architecture with different names: finite state machine, state-transition system, a state machine system or a event handling model. That is the architecture of the main web frameworks, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) frameworks, Orchestration frameworks, Workflow frameworks, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) frameworks and Business Process Management (BPM) frameworks, that solve respectively, the individual above mentioned integration problems.

See the tutorial at

https://www.fpcomplete.com/user/agocorona/how-haskell-can-solve-the-integration-problem

With a practical example.