Designing cliché authorship in the Déjà Vu web development platform

Abstract

Applications, though they differ vastly in purpose, tend to have many fundamental concepts in common, such as the concepts of authentication, ratings, and events. These recurring concepts are what we call clichés. Déjà Vu (DV) is a new platform that allows developers to build web applications without repeating cliché code, by assembling them using clichés from a library. While previous work on DV has focused on developing the cliché library and how clichés would be assembled to create applications, there has not been much work aimed at how the clichés themselves are written. Since clichés form the fundamental idea behind DV, it is vital that clichés can easily be created. This thesis explores and designs the underlying abstractions in DV to make the process of authoring clichés simple and straightforward. We successfully achieve this by constructing a DV command-line interface for scaffolding clichés; a cliche-server module which includes a database layer that hides the notion of transactions; and a subscription system which enables reactive clichés. These tools and libraries significantly reduce the code cliché authors need to write, as well as lessen cliché code complexity through the abstractions provided.