Why Unistack exists?

Without Unistack, it can be tedious to set up a new Bacon.js+React software project.

Why Unistack uses Bacon.js?

Bacon.js contains a comprehensive set of tools for modelling asynchronous programs. Most programming problems in web applications involve asynchronicity. Hence, Bacon.js is a useful tool for webapp programming.

How Bacon.js tackles asynchronicity? Please continue reading.

Bacon.js incorporates ideas from the world of functional programming. In functional programming, state-management problems are either absent or strictly cornered into the periphery of the application. This tactic removes a large class of bugs, the bugs that emerge from state management. Furthermore, Bacon.js has excellent support for composition. Composition allows the programmer to split the program into reusable fractions.

In addition to functional programming, Bacon.js leverages the ideas of reactive programming. In reactive programming the world is modelled through events and reactions to those events. This turns out to be a useful way of constructing software programs, because the real world is full of events and actors that react to those events. It follows that a programmer can maintain a coherent relationship between the real world and the software she is writing, when she thinks in terms of events and reactions.

Why Unistack uses React

Facebook React is a tool that takes away the burden of reflecting the changes in the application state to the view. In other words, React lets the programmer to simply describe the desired view as a function of data, and React will take care of applying the changes to the underlying view API, which in the case of web application programming is the browser’s DOM API.

In summary, thanks to React, the programmer is relieved of the cumbersome task of synching the application state to the view layer. This is a big deal!

Why Unistack uses both React and Bacon.js?

React and Bacon.js complement each other well: React excels at the view layer, whereas Bacon.js offers good tools to modelling asynchronous software.

With both React and Bacon.js onboard, Unistack offers a comprehensive set of tools for solving common problems in web application programming.

Are there alternatives to Bacon.js?

Yes there are. For example RxJS. If you are familiar with RxJS, you should be able to replace Bacon.js with RxJS in Unistack.

Where does the name Unistack come from?

The word Unistack derives from Universal JavaScript and Unidirectional Data Flow.

What is Universal JavaScript?

Literally, Universal JavaScript means that a programmer uses JavaScript everywhere.

In practice, it means that both the server and the client are written in JavaScript.

What are the benefits of Universal JavaScript?

• You can use the same libraries and source files both on the server and on the client
• You only need to master JavaScript to write a complete web application
  • You don’t have to master both C++ and JavaScript, for example
• You can describe the initial state of the web application on the server, then render that state as HTML and finally send the HTML to the user along with the first HTTP response
  • This results in good user experience, because the user sees the first state of the application on the screen even though the browser application has not yet started
  • See Isomorphic JavaScript by Airbnb and Universal JavaScript by Michael Jackson for more info

What is Unidirectional Data Flow?

In unidirectional data flow, two software components never interact directly with each other. This removes a class of problems that is caused by tightly, i.e. bidirectionally, bound software components.

The Facebook Flux architecture describes the unidirectional data flow here.

Here’s how unidirectional data flow looks like with Bacon.js: