Introduction

WARNING: Still being documented.

Capacitor.js is a well tested implementation of facebook's flux architecture written in CoffeeScript, which aims to do the following things:

• Be as close to the official definition of flux as possible, only making optimizations/features where there's too much boilerplate.
• Be easy to use, even for beginners, which means it should be easy to do it right, hard to do it wrong.
  • An example is the ActionCreators, which is the only way to dispatch an action without going out of your way.
• Have all stores be comprised of immutable data with immutable.js
• Handle relationships between stores with ease, without the boilerplate
• Be easy to extend, where extensions make sense.
• Scale well when used in teams by heavily encouraging thought before code, and try to minize how many ways you can solve a single problem.
• Feel great to use in CoffeeScript
• Feel just as great to use in TypeScript/ES6
• Support all the loaders, AMD/CommonJS/ES6/Globals whatever you need.

Features

• The dispatcher is an implementation detail, you never interact with it manually.
• Actions are class instances, no giant switch statements needed.
• Stores listen for actions by using the action classes.
• Four types of stores to model your data:
  • Store (generic state)
  • EntityStore (anything with an id)
  • ListStore (a list of entities)
  • IndexedListStore (a map from an entity id to a list of entity ids)
• With these four stores you can model the following:
  • one to one (Entity/Store -> Entity)
  • one to many (Entity/Store -> List -> Entity)
  • many to many (Entity/Store -> IndexedList -> Entity)
• ActionCreators dispatch actions.
• Batch change events on stores within a dispatch iteration to simplify store interactions.

Features we'd like to add

• [ ] Webpack Hot Loader
• [ ] Chrome Devtools Extension(s)
• [ ] State snapshots
• [ ] Replayable action logs

Dependencies

• lodash
• immutable-js

NOTE: Upgrading to capacitor > 0.2.x from capacitor < 0.2.x

Stores now use immutable js for the data. The API is still the same but the data returned is now instances of immutable's classes. See https://github.com/facebook/immutable-js for usage. Unfortunately this completely breaks backwards compatibility.