papers/astle-reactive-sdk/sections/01-introduction.tex

\section{Introduction}


Modern e-commerce user interfaces present significant state management challenges. A shopping cart alone involves multiple interacting concerns: local quantity adjustments, server synchronization, inventory validation, price calculations, and promotional rules. Traditional imperative approaches—mutating shared state in response to events—produce code that is difficult to reason about, test, and debug.

The emergence of reactive programming paradigms, particularly Facebook's Flux architecture \cite{flux2014} and its derivatives, offers a path forward. However, generic state management libraries require substantial boilerplate to handle commerce-specific concerns: API integration, optimistic updates, conflict resolution, and real-time synchronization.

Astle.js bridges this gap by providing a commerce-specific reactive SDK. Our contributions are:

\begin{enumerate}
\item A domain-specific state model capturing commerce primitives (cart, checkout, customer) with well-defined state transitions.
\item An event-sourced architecture enabling time-travel debugging and deterministic state reconstruction.
\item Optimistic update semantics with automatic rollback on server rejection.
\item Real-time synchronization via WebSocket with offline queuing and reconnection handling.
\end{enumerate}