At Tradeshift, we want to enable our users to work more closely together with their colleagues, suppliers, and customers. Real-time communication is becoming a growing feature that enables this, and we found a reactive architecture is a good implementation fit.

In that context, we are experimenting with a front-end architecture that embraces event-sourcing all the way into the web browser. By exchanging fine-grained events between clients, one can guarantee that all users eventually see the same document, as close to real-time as possible.

We realize this vision by using functional programming and streaming techniques, which we found a great fit for event sourcing. Outwatch and ScalaJS power the front-end part, with a clustered Akka application as back-end, storing events in a Cassandra cluster.