39 lines
1.8 KiB
Markdown
39 lines
1.8 KiB
Markdown
# Reactimal
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Reactimal is a set of tools that can be used to express your code as a logic graph using reactive
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programming methods.
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In computer science, we learn that a function is a process with some inputs and an output.
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Imperative programming languages focus on constructing the operations that convert inputs to output.
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Since a program is a collection of functions, there is inevitably shared state that the many
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functions act on. In this situation, one value in the shared state could be updated through any
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number of functions. The situation that causes this is called "spaghetti code" where code size grows
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to the point such that it's difficult to understand the code path that each task takes through the
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code base.
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To avoid this situation, Reactimal maintains links to the whole logic graph so it's easy to see what
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outputs come from what inputs.
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Reactimal provides the following reactive programming primitives. Each type of primitive is
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[subscribable](./subscribable.md) and provides a single output value, but differ in how they receive
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their input. In short:
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- A [property](./docs/property.md) directly receives a single value as an entry point to a logic
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graph
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- A [container](./docs/container.md) wraps javascript container objects and triggers an update when
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a property changes.
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- A [computed](./docs/computed.md) only receives values from other subscribables.
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- A [stream](./docs/stream.md) is the asynchronous version of a computed.
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Reactimal also includes a few [utilities](./docs/utilities.md) that may be useful when building logic
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graphs.
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## Inspiration
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Reactimal is the result of years of learning from the following projects:
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- [KnockoutJS](http://knockoutjs.com/)
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- [Overture](https://github.com/fastmail/overture)
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- [Redux](https://redux.js.org/)
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- [Mithril](https://mithril.js.org/)
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