Cute

An event-centric publisher/subscribe model for objects inspired by the Qt framework and middleware runner.

Why?

Decoupled inter-module communication Using signals, you can let your front- and back-end communicate without letting one know of the other.

Asynchronous work-flow Take action when events occur. Or add this later when a business-case appears. Never poll again.

Resource saving Reduce load on CPU by only rendering only when something happened. Reduce network traffic by batching messages to be sent into fewer densly packed network packets.

Ease development Don't waste too much time on not leaking fibers all over the place.

Standarized communication Use signals at every layer, and have one standarized way of in-process communication. Don't write callback handling code for the umpteenth time. You need to act on data, and not react to it? See middlewares!

Test communication Using Cute.spy, you can spy on signal communication. Have an excuse for not testing it up til now? Well, not anymore :)

Test processing robustness Using middlewares for processing data? You can easily add a middleware which fails: Always for tests, or just now and then. To improve in-process robustness - Or to drive your coworker crazy. Please prefer the former.

Installation

Add this to your application's shard.yml:

dependencies:
  cute:
    github: Papierkorb/cute

Usage

See samples/ for more examples.

Signals

Let your user know about an event, without disrupting flow, and without writing some callback code for the umpteenth time. This is a notification mechanism, so the callback (the "slot") has no way of returning something to you. If you need that, see the next section.

See the in-source docs of Cute.signal for further details.

require "cute"

class Button
  Cute.signal clicked(x : Int32, y : Int32)
end

btn = Button.new
btn.clicked.on { |x, y| p x, y }
btn.clicked.emit 5, 4 #=> Will print 5, 4

Middleware

It's easy to allow the user of your library to augment, or otherwise extend, the behaviour of your logic. A middleware works akin to a UNIX pipe, where the input arguments (or the result) can be modified along the call.

See the Cute.middleware in-source docs for further details.

class Chat
  @io : IO = STDOUT

  Cute.middleware def send_message(body : String) : Int32
    @io.puts "Sending #{body}"
    body.size
  end
end

chat = Chat.new

# Add a Capt'n Caps middleware :)
chat.send_message.add { |body, yielder| yielder.call(body.upcase) }

# Send a message
chat.send_message.call("Hello") #=> 5
# Prints "Sending HELLO"

Contributing

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/Papierkorb/cute/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request

Contributors

• Papierkorb Stefan Merettig - creator, maintainer