A Front-End User Interface Layer Framework for Reactive Web Applications

Abstract

Nowadays, people are relying more and more on web applications, such as Gmails, Google Map and Google Docs to complete their daily tasks. However, web applications often fail to provide reactive interactions with users. This paper explores the issues and problems of current web application frameworks and narrowed the research to the User Interface (UI) layer as it is the most important component to focus on in terms of increasing web application reactiveness. By integrating two Javascript libraries, namely, Preact and Preact-router into the UI layer, the proposed approach optimizes the way how the web server and web client communicates, which leads to a more reactive web application. The proposed UI layer framework was tested against a current framework and found that the proposed framework reduced a significant amount of page load time. In addition, number of requests sent to a web server was also reduced compared to the current framework. The proposed UI layer framework can be applied to business web applications to increase their applications load time and reactiveness. By making their web applications more reactive, it would potentially have a positive impact on the conversion rates of their businesses.