webmachine

Webmachine's approach to resource functions and referential transparency

Webmachine goes to great lengths to help your resource functions to be as referentially transparent as possible. By "referentially transparent" we mean that given the same input {ReqData, Context} the function will return the same output {Result, ReqData, Context} and that side effects will be insignificant from the point of view of Webmachine's execution.

We don't try to force you into pure referential transparency; we give you as big a hole as you want via Context. As that term is application-specific, you can put database handles, server process identifiers, or anything else you like in there and we won't try to stop you.

However, all Webmachine really cares about is the rest of the terms. Since resource functions are generally referentially transparent at least with regard to those terms, many things are easier -- testing, debugging, and even static analysis and reasoning about your Web application.

Note that there is one important exception to this. The streamed body feature exists to allow resources to consume or produce request/response bodies a hunk at a time without ever having the whole thing in memory. While the continuation-passing style used in the streaming API is friendly to general functional analysis, due to the necessary side-effect of reading or writing to sockets the stream bodies cannot be treated in quite the same way as other uses of the ReqData interface. Luckily, it is easy to inspect a ReqData to see if this is the case in any individual resource or request instance.