Verstak - Experimental Front-End Library

Verstak is a experimental library for rapid development of user interfaces. It provides automatic refresh of visual elements upon change of underlying data in a program.

Refresh on the screen is fine-grained, meaning that only those visual elements are refreshed, which really depend on actual data changed. It is achieved by automatic tracking of all dependencies between visual elements and data they use during run time. Such an approach is usually called reactive programming. It frees a programmer from writing boilerplate code for "pushing" changed data to visual elements.

Changing of compound data and refreshing of visual elements on the screen is performed consistently, in other words in "all-or-nothing" way. It means that in case of changing multiple variables in a program actual visual refresh happens only in case of successful change of all the variables. Partial changes are "not visible" to visual elements even in case of exception or cancellation of changes. Such a change of compound data in "all-or-nothing" way is called a transaction.

Verstak supports asynchronous programming out of the box at all the layers, including transactions and visual elements rendering.

Altogether it is called reactive transactional programming. Transactional reactivity means that state changes are being made in an isolated data snapshot and then, once atomically applied, are consistently propagated to corresponding visual components for (re)rendering. All that is done in automatic, seamless, and fine-grained way, because Verstak takes full care of tracking dependencies between visual components (observers) and state objects (observables).

Example application: https://nevod.io (source code).

Verstak is based on Reactronic.