Introducing hexagonal.js

http://blog.arkency.com/2013/02/introducing-hexagonal-dot-js/

by yashke • 13 years ago

59 42 13 years ago

blog.arkency.com

How can it be a good thing to follow the MVC framework on both the client side and the server side, as it says in it's philosophy, when the client side is the V in MVC?

yashke7• 13 years ago

Good question. In hexagonal.js approach client side is full app - so there's model part (use case is part of model), glue ~ controller and views are GUI and other adapters.

Rocky_Outcrop3• 13 years ago

Thanks for letting me know. I'll not be rushing out to add hexagonal.js to my Rails app, but if one of my friends who likes js wants to try building their own full app I'll mention this as a possibility.

upthedale2• 13 years ago

Why can't MVC be compositional? The model of the client can come from the server's view. For example, a server could follow MVC, where the view is responsible for forming the data (such as in JSON or XML). In turn, that could form the model for the client's use of MVC.

jerf2• 13 years ago

"Why can't MVC be compositional?"

Because then it's not really MVC anymore. It's something else, perhaps inspired by MVC, but not MVC.

The web world really needs to get over its juvenile idea that MVC is the One True Architecture and if something isn't MVC it isn't good and therefore if we want to present a new library with a new design it is Mandatory to explain how "No, really, it's MVC! Even though it isn't, here's how it is!". It's not MVC. That's fine. It's probably better. Many designs are. MVC is fine in its niche but that niche doesn't cover Every Web Application Ever very well.

irickt3• 13 years ago

The OP likens the technique to DCI, which is contrasted to MVC by the inventor of both techniques in this article:

http://www.artima.com/articles/dci_vision.html

x10242• 13 years ago

There's far too many typos for me to have any amount of confidence in the code itself.

Sorry, but I can't trust my business with people who cannot even be bothered to write proper English for their introduction.

yashke7• 13 years ago

Sorry for my poor english, I'm still learning :(

robotmay2• 13 years ago

No need to apologise; he was being a dick. Your english isn't bad and his comment is totally uncalled for.

vidarh• 13 years ago

While there are some errors on your page, don't worry too much about it. It is fully possibly to understand and make sense of it.

As someone else said, he was being a dick about it, and the implication that English skills are somehow related to coding skills is obviously nonsense. (And he still managed to make mistakes of his own while criticising your language)

To be a bit more constructive, here's a slightly rewritten introductory paragraph that I believe reads more natural (though English isn't my native language either):

"There's an idea we have been working on for more than one year so far. As backend developers we were thrown into the mysterious world of frontend (client-side) apps without any good pattern for creating Single Page Apps. So we (GameBoxed + Arkency) invented one - hexagonal.js."

But the most frequently occurring English mistake on your page appears to be missing "the"'s. This error is very common with speakers of slavic languages. Based on the admittedly limited example of your English on the linked page, I think one of the biggest improvements you can get with relatively little effort would be if you spend some time reading up on how to identify where/how to use "the".

MrMan• 13 years ago

it was fine, perfectly readable. thanks for the cool library.

kalms• 13 years ago

I think that's a really nasty way to begin a conversation. It wasn't that bad at all.

It's a pitch from dedicated folks. Treat it as such?

On topic: Looks like an interesting collection of ideas, and as I've never heard of hexagonal architecture I'll definitely have to look into this. Always researching better ways of doing structure.

irickt3• 13 years ago

Unintended humor alert: x1024's criticism is not idiomatic English. "... can't trust by business with ..." should be " ... can't trust my business to ..."

x10242• 13 years ago

I'm sorry for my angry comment. I guess I didn't hit the proper tone. I'm leaving it here for my eternal embarrassment, but here's what I meant to say:

I have had many bad experiences with incompetently-written libraries. A bad library can cost you days/weeks of productivity lost in fighting its idiosyncrasies and/or straight up bugs. A really-good indicator of the quality of a lib is the attention to detail in "minor" details like documentation.

Obviously if the docs are littered with typos they will be less useful, but there's another layer to it. English isn't much of a problem for sufficiently-skilled programmers, even if they are of foreign descent.

So, when I see a lib written in broken english like this, I make my conclusions about the attentiveness and skill of whoever wrote it. I'm not saying it's always right, but in the long-term this has saved me a lot of headaches.

Sorry for raining on everyone's parade, though. This really isn't the proper way to start a conversation.

jimwhitson2• 13 years ago

Although I broadly agree with your point about significant details, it's absolutely not the case that English 'isn't much of a problem'. English is an extraordinarily hard language for a foreign learner: the grammar is idiosyncratic and subtle, our use of prepositions is frankly bizarre, the orthography is about as difficult as they get, etc. etc. etc.. English is a dominant language for historical reasons, but it would be hard to choose a worse one on linguistic grounds.

seivan• 13 years ago

Woaah, it's a cool idea, but I wonder how productive one would be in it. Will have to give it a shot later.

yashke7• 13 years ago

So the switching your mindset to hexagonal.js is quite hard at the beginning and I think it's the most time consuming part. Then you are very productive - gameboxed.com developed > 20 small and large apps using hexagonal.js last year.

btipling2• 13 years ago

Why not call it hexagonal.coffee? Why do CoffeeScript libraries get a .js extension? Yes I realize it works for JavaScript too, but it's weird to go see a library with *.js in the name and then to find only CoffeeScript in the documentation.

yashke7• 13 years ago

We'll try to deliver new examples in pure JS.

btipling2• 13 years ago

That was an honest question more than a complaint. Why do CoffeeScript libraries not use the coffee extension? For broader appeal? Even if you had JavaScript documentation, I would see the source was written in CoffeeScript and realize I can't easily evaluate the quality of the source. Choosing CoffeeScript must mean you prefer it over JavaScript, so why use the extension of a language you do not prefer over one you do?

ricardobeat5• 13 years ago

Because it is javascript, to be used by javascript projects. Not having JS examples is just a problem in the docs, not the library.

k3n4• 13 years ago

No, it's not JS.

    > class UseCase
    SyntaxError: Unexpected reserved word

k3n4• 13 years ago

You read my mind, and I couldn't agree more; might as well call it hexagonal.cpp because hey, eventually it'll get run as C++.

robotmay2• 13 years ago

This looks quite neat and the Rails example (https://github.com/hexagonaljs/rails-example) is interesting. I'll definitely have a play around with it later in my never-ending quest to find JS libraries that don't make me want to snap my computer in half.

irickt3• 13 years ago

Hexagonal uses Raganwald's metaprogramming ideas. Follow the links from the dependency at https://github.com/gameboxed/YouAreDaBomb.

This shows the beauty of Coffeescript syntax for functional programming. For a deep understanding read Raganwald's new book http://ristrettolo.gy.

andrzejkrzywda• 13 years ago

This.

I'm one of the people behind hexagonal.js. Raganwald's work enabled us to implement one of the main components - the glue code.

k3n4• 13 years ago

Ok, I was thinking the idea behind this sounded a lot like the M.O. of Aspect-Oriented Programming, and it wasn't until I followed your github link that I saw that it was an "AOP library for JavaScript".

Not to take anything away from Raganwald, but there are other AOP JS projects (meld[1] would be an example).

1. https://github.com/cujojs/meld

ricardobeat5• 13 years ago

Isn't that glue going to fall apart when you start working with asynchronous methods? I might be suffering from tunnel vision, but IMO this is asking for an evented model:

    class Glue
      constructor: (@useCase, @gui, @storage)->
        @useCase.on
            askForName   : @gui.showAskForName
            nameProvided : @gui.hideAskForName
            greetUser    : @gui.showGreetMessage
            restart      : @gui.hideGreetMessage
        @gui.on
            restartClicked : @useCase.restart
            confirmName    : @useCase.nameProvided

yashke7• 13 years ago

We use Around in such cases - it can put original method call to callback of asynchronous method.

tinco• 13 years ago

This looks very cool, I've recently finished a Javascript application that used AOP for connecting the View to the Model and it rocked. I think I implemented up more or less this framework, but less generic.

The name is an issue though, hexagonal.js doesn't seem to have to do anything with what this framework does. If it is a framework that applies AOP to MVC, why not pick a name that relates to that? There isn't even a mention of AOP anywhere in the introduction.

Introducing hexagonal.js

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