Milkman

Routing framework

Milkman manages the application route. Through it, you may navigate the application, and have your application's components respond to route changes. The route may be represented by URL hash, pushstate, or an internal static global. Milkman is built on top of troop for OOP, sntls for data structures, and evan for eventing.

Wiki

Reference

Npm package

Getting started

Configuration

Right after milkman has been loaded (required), you may specify whether you want to use hash or pushstate-based routing, by setting the flag milkman.usePushState. The flag has no effect under node.

milkman.usePushState = true;

Navigation

Navigating to a route is quite simple. Convert a route string to a Route instance, which offers an API that includes navigation.

• Synchronous navigation changes the route immediately. By the time execution comes to the next line, the route will have changed. Example: 'user/joe'.toRoute().navigateTo().
• Asynchronous navigation lets the current thread finish before the route will change. Async navigation returns a Q promise, giving you the opportunity to specify some follow-up. Example: 'user/joe'.toRoute().navigateToAsync().
• Debounced navigation allows you to skip routes would they be overridden by subsequent navigation commands within a specified time frame (100ms by default). This is useful when re-routing due to some condition not being met by the application's state. Example: 'user/joe'.toRoute().navigateToDebounced().

Alternatively, if you don't want the route to be reflected in the URL (hash or state), silent navigation is also possible.

'user/joe'.toRoute().navigateToSilent();

Responding to routing events

Milkman triggers routing events in a special event space, whenever the application route changes, either through the hash, or pushstate. To capture such events, eg. for all 'user' routes, use the following expression known from evan.

'user'.toRoute().subscribeTo(milkman.Router.EVENT_ROUTE_CHANGE, function (event) {
    console.log(event.beforeRoute.toString());
    console.log(event.afterRoute.toString());
});

To listen to all routing events, you'll need to subscribe to en empty route.

[].toRoute().subscribeTo(...);

Sample code

To see milkman in action, check out Hills.