Deprecating the Observer Pattern with Scala.React

Abstract

Programming interactive systems by means of the observer pattern is hard and error-prone yet is still the implementation standard in many production environments. We show how to integrate different reactive programming abstractions into a single framework that help migrate from observer-based event handling logic to more declarative implementations. Our central API layer embeds an extensible higher-order data-flow DSL into our host language. This embedding is enabled by a continuation passing style transformation.