Browsing by Author "Eloranta, Juha-Pekka"

Single-page application (SPA) model has become a popular way of building web-applications. It makes the user experience of a website more similar to desktop-applications. This is achieved by not having to make a request to backend for each page navigation and operation. However the SPA model brings some challenges of distributed data management to basic web-applications. Managing distributed consistency is a perennial research topic in computer science. Yet this has received little attention in single-page application context. This thesis compares single-page applications to distributed databases and aims to identify techniques from them that could be used in single-page applications. The comparison begins by looking at different distributed databases and analysing which of them matches closest to the single-page application model. Then the comparison focuses on two topics. Techniques used by distributed databases for replicating data from site to another are presented and compared to techniques used in web application in communication between the server and the browser. Next topic of the thesis is to study how consistency related models like ACID-properties along with isolation levels and anomalies are realized or manifested in single-page applications. As a result of the comparison it was observed that the data transfer methods used in distributed databases and web-applications were somewhat different from each other. Distributed systems favor push model for replication and replication is automatic from application developers perspective. Web applications ofter use pull-model and implementing replication is application developers responsibility. A set of consistency anomalies that can be manifested in single-page applications where found while analysing the consistency topic. The findings give a good starting point for developing libraries that could solve some of the problems that were found.