Computational REST Meets Erlang

Today’s applications are developed in a world where the execution context changes continuously. They have to adapt to these changes at run-time if they want to offer their services without interruption. This is particularly critical for distributed Web applications, whose components run on different machines, often managed by different organizations. Designing these programs in an easy and effective way requires choosing the right architectural style and the right run-time platform. The former has to guarantee isolation among components, supporting scalability, reliability, and dynamic changes. The latter has to offer mechanisms to update the applications’ code at run-time. This work builds upon previous research about architectures and runtime platforms. Its contribution is to put together a very promising architectural style - Computational REST - with a language (and run-time environment) designed with dynamic, distributed applications in mind - Erlang. We show how they fit together by developing a new framework, which eases development of highly distributed Web applications capable of operating in dynamic environments. We also provide an initial experimental assessment of the proposed approach.