Omniscient Net

A simple event based / actor model that pretty much does what it wants.

Requirements:

• node v7.7.1 or higher

Optional requirements

• rethinkdb if you want to use rethinkdb storage driver

About this library

Omniscient Net is an attempt to make distributed objects simple and event based.

For example, say we have an api, called the "smart-api". We need to perform an action, have it only occur once, and store the result as part of the state.

It might look something like:

import { Actor } from 'omniscient-net';
import api from 'smart-api';

class SmartActor extends Actor {
    async DoSomething(smart) {
        const response = await api.get(smart);
        await this.Fire('did_smart_thing', response);
    }
    
    async did_smart_thing(data) {
        this.state.amSmart = data.isSmart;
    }
}

There's two functions to this class:

• DoSomething
• did_smart_thing

When you call DoSomething, it will perform a side effect on the universe, and "fire" the result. Every running instance of SmartActor will instantly receive the result and update it's internal state.

So, how to use SmartActor? Here's an example:

import { RqlStorage } from 'omniscient-net';
import SmartActor from './SmartActor';

const storage = new RqlStorage('host', 'db', 'port');
const actor = new SmartActor('id', storage);
actor
    .Load()
    .then(() => actor.DoSomething('am i smart?'))
    .then(() => actor.Destroy());

Any running instance will automatically have did_smart_thing called on it, as well as any future instances with the same id, when Load() is called.

Writing tests with jest (or jasmine) is incredibly simple:

import {Given} from 'omniscient-net';
import SmartActor from './SmartActor';

describe('a smart actor', () => {
	it('figures out if its smart', async () => {
		const test = await Given(SmartActor, [])
		    .When('DoSomething', 'am i smart?')
		    .Then([
		    	{
		    		name: 'did_smart_thing',
		    		data: {
		    			isSmart: false
		    		}
		    	}
		    ]);
		await test.And({
			amSmart: false
		});
	});
});

This is simple event sourcing.

API

Memstorage

An in-memory storage adapter.