Every frontend framework tries to answer the same question - what is the best way to manage the application state. There are many approaches - MVC, MVVM, Flux, Redux... - and Keechma also has it's own.

Each of this approaches is giving the answers to the following questions:

How to communicate with the rest of the world (calling an API)?

How to respond to user interactions (mouse clicks, key presses...)?

How to mutate the application state?

Keechma apps implement this kind of code in controllers. Controllers are a place for all the dirty, impure parts of your app code, and they act as a bridge between your (pure) domain code and code that has side effects (storing a user on the server).

How are controllers different?

While philosophically close to Redux actions and reducers, Keechma controllers differ significantly in the implementation.

Keechma controllers have enforced lifecycle

Keechma controllers are route driven

Keechma controllers can implement a long-running process that can react to commands

Drivers of change

Changes in the application state happen for a few different reasons:

Page reload Route change User action

Keechma treats page reload and route change as tectonic changes - a lot (or all) of the data in the application state will probably change when one of these happen. User actions are more of an incremental change, they will probably affect a small amount of data (for instance, the user might favorite a post - this is a small, incremental change to the application state).

Keechma controllers have their lifecycles controlled and enforced by the URL. Each controller implements a param function which tells the controller manager if that controller should be running or not. Controller Manager (internal part of Keechma) has a set of rules which determine what should happen when the route changes. Whenever the URL changes, Controller Manager will do the following:

It will call the params function of all registered controllers It will compare the returned value to the previous value (returned on the previous URL change) Based on the returned value it will do the If the previous value was nil and the current value is nil it won't do a thing If the previous value was nil and the current value is not nil it will start the controller If the previous value was not nil and the current value is nil it will stop the controller If the previous value was not nil and the current value is not nil but those values are same, it won't do a thing If the previous value was not nil and the current value is not nil but those values are different it will restart the controller

Controller manager ensures that the same controllers will always run for the same URL - it doesn't matter if it's a route change or a full page reload. This makes reasoning about the application state easier, you can treat every route change as if it was a full page reload. This was inspired by the React's way of reasoning where you don't care how the DOM is changed, you can mentally treat it as a full re-render.

Minimal layer of abstraction

Redux and similar frameworks model state changes as a combination of actions and reducers.

The only way to change the state tree is to emit an action, an object describing what happened. To specify how the actions transform the state tree, you write pure reducers. Redux documentation

While I like the simplicity of this approach, I feel that it's pushing the state management complexity to the application layer. If you model every state change as a (synchronous) action, every interaction that talks to the outer world will require multiple actions. This makes the flow hard to follow.

Instead of abstracting that kind of code, Keechma gives you complete control of how and when you change the application state. Controllers get full (read / write) access to the application state, and you can use any approach that fits your application.

Here's an example of a non-standard controller:

(defrecord Controller [] controller/IController (params [_ route] ;; This controller is active only on the order-history page (when (= (get-in route [:data :page]) "order-history") true)) (start [this params app-db] ;; When the controller is started, load the order history (controller/execute this :load-order-history) app-db) (handler [this app-db-atom in-chan out-chan] ;; When the controller is started connect to the websocket. ;; This way we can receive the messages when something changes ;; and update the application state accordingly. ;; ;; connect-socketio function returns the function that can be ;; used to disconnect from the websocket. (let [disconnect (connect-socketio in-chan)] (go (loop [] (let [[command args] (<! in-chan)] (case command ;; When the controller is started, load the order-history :load-order-history (load-order-history app-db-atom) ;; When we get the order-created command from the websocket, ;; create a new order :order-created (order-created app-db-atom args) ;; When we get the order-updated command from the websocket, ;; update the order in the entity-db :order-updated (order-updated app-db-atom args) ;; When we get the order-removed command from the websocket, ;; remove the item from the entity-db. This will automatically ;; remove it from any list that references it :order-removed (order-removed app-db-atom args) ;; Disconnect from the websocket :disconnect (disconnect) nil) (when command (recur))))))) (stop [this params app-db] ;; When the controller is stopped, send the command to disconnect from ;; the websocket and remove any data this controller has loaded. (controller/execute this :disconnect) (edb/remove-collection app-db :orders :history)))

Source Code

This controller contains logic for a data source that receives updates over a websocket. Here's what's going on:

Controller will be started when the route's page attribute is order-history On controller start, it will load the order history from server On controller start, it will connect to a websocket and listen to events ( connect-socketio function returns a function that disconnects a websocket connection). On controller stop, it will disconnect itself from the websocket and remove any loaded data from the application state

Important thing is that all of this functionality lives in the same place, and you can easily figure out how it works. There is no need to jump around and play the event ping pong.

Abstractions on top of controllers

Low level of abstraction is great because it doesn't force you to fit your problem into the approach that is implemented by the framework. The bad thing about the low level of abstraction is that you have a lot of boilerplate code to solve the simple stuff.

This is why the pipelines were introduced. You can read the full blog post about them here, but in a nutshell - they exist to make the simple problems easy to solve.

Pipelines embrace the asynchronous nature of frontend development while allowing you to keep the related code grouped together. Let's take a look at an example that is familiar: You want to load some data from the server, and you want to let the user know what is the status of the request. You also want to handle any errors that might happen:

(pipeline! [value app-db] (pp/commit! (assoc app-db :articles-status :loading)) (load-articles-from-server) (pp/commit! (-> app-db (assoc :articles-status :loaded) (assoc :articles value))) (rescue! [error] (pp/commit! (assoc app-db :articles-status :error))))

This approach was inspired by the Railway Oriented Programming talk, and the nice thing about it is that it was possible to implement a system like this because controllers give you a full access to application state. Pipelines are not a core Keechma feature, they are implemented in a separate library.

Conclusion

Controllers give you a full control over your application. They don't presume that you can fit your problem into any pattern or way of thinking. Their abstraction level is intentionally low, and you have a complete access to the application state. This makes it possible to solve non standard, specific problems with them. When you need an easy way to handle standard problems (like data loading, or user interaction) - use pipelines.

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