Unidirectional Circular Dataflow Architecture for Real-Time
Updates
The capability to present data in real-time is an essential feature to be considered
when architecting modern web applications. Examination of the origin, progress and
obstacles of web applications reveals how it influenced the current state of how web
applications are implemented to deliver data in real-time. This research aims to investigate
an alternative and reproducible approach to address real-time, moving away from
outdated requisites and not extending existing implementations. When considering
real-time systems, how to build an architecture that satisfies its requirements?
Based on the review of the literature, understanding the current context of web applications
and exploring available libraries and frameworks, an architecture is proposed
broken down in layers that are responsible for ensuring each of the real-time system’s
requisites. An open source library is implemented developed to wrap and abstract the
implementation of the unidirectional flow. The results show that not only the unidirectional
data flow architecture is theoretically superior addressing such requisites, but
also more maintainable. Further research is needed to run more comparisons, also to
explore the usage of this approach outside the scope of the web applications.