Herein outlines a vision for what a behavioral paradigm for building highly interactive, client-side heavy web applications could look like. It attempts to address problems and challenges with the component paradigm that is commonplace these days. Such challenges include:
- Component frameworks cluster on templates. Behavior/state is tighly colocated to a particular component in the tree and as requirements change this behavior must be refactored as it's needed in other places. Over time, more and more state is hoisted up to the root of the component tree.
- Event listeners are directly attached to UI elements. This encourages the event-action paradigm, where event listeners have a increasing amount of conditional logic because it has to figure out the qualatative state the application is in to know what side effects to execute. This leads to a large source of bugs (see Horrock's book "Constructing the USer Interface with Statecharts" for a more elaborate explanation).
- Behavior is scattered between compone