ThunderCats.js

ThunderCats, Ho!

Flux meets RxJS

Why

The Flux architecture allows you to think of your application as an unidirectional flow of data, this module aims to facilitate the use of RxJS Observable as basis for defining the relations between the different entities composing your application. This module also implements Universal JavaScript First design. What does that mean? It means the module is designed with the intent to be used both server-side and client-side from the beginning.

How

The main components of Flux are Actions, Stores, and the dispatcher. ThunderCats replaces the dispatcher with RxJS observables and does away with singletons.

Why get rid of the dispatcher? Actions in ThunderCats are observables and observables dispatch themselves to their observers (or listeners) much better then a singleton dispatcher could. And as a bonus, no actions are composable because observables are composable!

What about stores? Store in ThunderCats are also observables that can be composed. They observe, or listen, to actions they are interested directly. No need for it to noop every action.

What about singletons?

ThunderCats uses stampit! Stores, Actions, and Cats (more on this later) are stamp factories that return factories(called stamps).

But why not es6(2015) classes? Everybody's doing it!

If everyone jumped off a bridge would you do it, too? Here are some great articles on why not to use es6 classes or constructors in general.

• How to Fix the ES6 class keyword
• Stop Using Constructor Functions in JavaScript

Tl;DR new and class are broken, and borked.

Wait a second, what are Cats?

A Cat is a bag where you can register your store and actions factories. It is also a stamp factory that creates factories that create instances of a cat. By themselves they are only slightly useful and optional, but combine them with ThunderCats-React and you can do cool things like server-side rendering with data pre-fetching and call render methods using the observable pattern.

Install

npm install thundercats

ThunderCats makes heavy use of es6 Map object. While available in the latest versions of Node.js, io.js and all modern browsers, a great many older browsers will need a polyfill in order to work with ThunderCats.

I recommend using es6-map as a polyfill for just the Map object or babel polyfill to give you all the es6 goodies!

Examples!

Check out:

• TodoMVC app.
• Chat App.
• The source for The R3DM Consulting isomorphic app.

Docs

• Docs

Contributing

Commits messages should start with

• adds
• changes
• fixes
• removes

Use eslint to lint according to the provided .eslintrc file. Add unit tests for new features.