Browsing by Author "Vilja, Peter"
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- Applications of Category Theory to Web Programming
Perustieteiden korkeakoulu | Master's thesis(2018-05-14) Vilja, PeterModern Web applications are highly interactive and complex with various challenges, such as maintaining mutable states and making asynchronous operations, which need to be addressed. By addressing these challenges, Web applications can be made easier to develop, maintain and reason about. This thesis presents common category theory concepts and how they can be used to solve these challenges by structuring and easing the development of complex Web applications. The current state and benefits of applying category theory concepts in Web programming are presented by comparing existing category theory based tools in multiple programming languages against the challenges along with concrete examples. Implementations of categorical concepts in the existing tools are compared against the theory. Furthermore, related research about a specific challenge is presented. Many of the challenges can be addressed with various monads as they can model numerous side effects such as DOM manipulations. Researched tools provide different algebraic data types, which implement abstractions such as functor, applicative functor and monad from category theory. These abstractions, in turn, unify several programming languages and libraries. Additionally, they provide clear semantics and laws to build interactive and complex Web applications, which are easy to develop and reason about.