ENGINEERING · 05 / 06

Building new frameworks

Application frameworks are core to the web, providing one of the fastest ways to author modern applications. With a rederivation of the existing computing substrate, the premise of the traditional application framework is changing, and new frameworks are needed. A ground-up framework is the most direct way to realize the full potential of that substrate.

Oxford's work here includes:

01Framework

Webflo framework

A web-native application framework for backends, frontends, offline-first, and realtime apps, built from programming fundamentals and platform capabilities rather than on top of traditional framework layers. Reactivity is mutation-based, via the Observer API: state is plain objects and arrays, with no stores, hooks, or signals, and mutation is the shared language across server, service worker, and client. HTTP gains a realtime channel — handlers can send multi-stage responses, share live state with the client that updates differentially, and pause to interact with the user. UI is authored directly in HTML, with OOHTML providing modularity and data binding without a build step. The service worker becomes a full routing runtime alongside the server and client.

Tags
Application frameworkWeb-nativeMutation-based reactivityRealtime over HTTPLiveResponseOOHTMLService Worker routingFolder-based routing
Repositories