Developing Distributed Systems with Multitier Programming

Developing distributed systems is a complex task that requires to program different peers, often using several languages on different platforms, writing communication code and handling data serialization and conversion.We show how the multitier programming paradigm can alleviate these issues, supporting a development model where all peers in the system can be written in the same language and coexist in the same compilation units, communication code is automatically inserted by the compiler and the language abstracts over data conversion and serialization. We present multitier programming abstractions, discuss their applicability step by step for the development of small applications and discuss larger case studies on distributed stream processing, like Apache Flink and Apache Gearpump.