Kiichigo

Summary

Before we start, I want to point out, that this article covers low-level API of Route Framework. In most case you don’t want to worry about low-level, unless you building your own framework on top or with Route Framework

Center of Route Framework are IRoute and it’s implementor Route hence the name of the framework. Route sort of inspired by Agent Oriented¹ approach minus concurrency and proactivity and EventHandlers from Mate Framework². Generally it consists of three types of instances: ISensor, IPattern and IAction.
Simply put:

• Sensor get’s messages from Environment, which uses some way to send and receive messages, whether it’s flash.events.Event or some custom solution.
• After sensor received message, it parses it if needed and passes it’s to IRoute.perceive( percept:Object ); method. In future we’ll call “sensed” message – percept.
• IRoute will match percept against IPattern
• If successful Route will then execute it’s IAction

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This allows IRoute to be very agile Inversion of Control³ container. Each part of a framwork is simple enough system that can be easily modified.

Percept

Plainly speaking percept can be anything: Object, String, Event or any kind of instance. Whatever Sensor retrieves from Application and passes to Route considered to be Percept. Percept will then be matched against Patterns and passed along to Actions assigned to current Route.

Sensor

In lamen terms Sensor is an Event Listener or an instance of Observer. It simply receives messages from Application/Environment. Of course Sensors can be internal too. For example there could be a Sensor that listens to internal messages of other Routes, but that’s more rare case.

Pattern

Plainly put, Patterns used by Route to see if Actions will be executed. For example Handle Route:

route( Handle, { event: SampleEvent.BIND_PLEASE, generator: SampleEvent } ).

<route:Handle event="{SampleEvent.BIND_PLEASE}" generator="{SampleEvent}"/>

Uses two patterns, to filter by Event.type and actual Class of Event.

Actions

Actions are variation on Command Design Pattern⁵. Predefined actions in package eu.kiichigo.route.actions cover basic Application manipulation such as: Apply/Bind/Copy data, run closure or method on class, invoke RPC operation and such. You can extend Action, AsyncAction or Actions classes in order to create custom functionality.

There is two major things you can do with actions: assign predicates and group actions

Conclusion

This covers basic logic of Route, once again, this is low-level API which most programmers should not concern themselves with.

Footnotes

[1] PDF: Shoham, “Agent-oriented Programming”.
[2] Mate Framework.
[3] Martin Fowler about IoC.
[4] Command Pattern at Wikipedia.