Using Functional Programming for Development of Distributed, Cloud and Web Applications in F#

TL;DR

This paper advocates for using F# functional programming language on the .NET platform to develop distributed, web, and cloud applications, demonstrating its versatility and specific features like quotations for such tasks.

Contribution

It demonstrates how F# can be effectively used across various application scenarios, including distributed web systems and cloud data processing, highlighting its unique features.

Findings

F# is suitable for distributed, web, and cloud applications.

F# features like quotations facilitate distributed system development.

WebSharper enables building distributed client-server web apps.

Abstract

In this paper, we argue that modern functional programming languages - in particular, FSharp on the .NET platform - are well suited for the development of distributed, web and cloud applications on the Internet. We emphasize that FSharp can be successfully used in a range of scenarios - starting from simple ASP.NET web applications, and including cloud data processing tasks and data-driven web applications. In particular, we show how some of the FSharp features (eg. quotations) can be effectively used to develop a distributed web system using single code-base, and describe the commercial WebSharper project by Intellifactory for building distributed client-server web applications, as well as research library that uses Windows Azure for parametric sweep computational tasks.