Building Web, Cloud, and Mobile Solutions with F#

Chapter 5. Functional Frontend Development

The art challenges the technology, and the technology inspires the art.

—John Lasseter

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been playing the guitar. I grew up traveling around on weekends playing in my parents’ musical group. This instilled within me a love for the combination of “science” (i.e., music theory, etc.) and art.

Note

You can hear some of my original music here.

When I first started working with programming languages, the experience brought out similar feelings. While computer programming has many aspects that fit into the science category, the creation of simple, elegant, and beautiful code is certainly an art.

Throughout this book, I’ve shown you a variety of ways to use F# to create web, mobile, and cloud solutions. Throughout this journey, the F# aspects of the solutions were generally focused on the server side. The examples have increasingly added more and more functional concepts into the mix and the implementation of these concepts has made the solutions more elegant and beautiful. It would be nice to take these concepts and make them available for development of frontend code.

As we all know, JavaScript is the primary language for client-side web development. I really like JavaScript, especially the functional aspects of it. However, it would be great if there were even more functional features. Is there any way that we can make JavaScript even more functional than it already is? The answer, of course, is yes, and there are ...