Reactive - News

Complete rewrite

2009-05-13T13:14:00Z

One year passed from the proof of concept release 0.1.0.

Now is the time of release 0.2.0, I still consider it as an alpha release, many changes have been made. In fact I rewrote it completely.

You may get the new release on rubyforge or with the gem command (read furthur with the how-to article).

Your comments are welcome,

Pascal

Architecture

2009-05-13T13:14:00Z

The new Reactive release is based on a simple architecture.

Let’s take an example: An application issues a request, this request will be processed by a dispatcher which will likely produce a response. This response should be treated by the application, it will through an output handler.

So an application is a bundle of dispatchers and output handlers.

What is a request like?

A request may be “list all my books”, so the response should be a representation of the books list. The user should see this list.

The dispatcher is responsible of handling the request, thus getting the book list.
The output handler will expose the book list to the user in a form chosen by the request but created by the dispatcher.

In the current release, I provide a dispatcher that is capable of handling request in a MVC manner, this is reactive-mvc. I also provide an output handler which present the result with the WxWidgets toolkit, using wxRuby ,this is reactive-wx.

Here is a more detailed architecture schema:

You may see that several dispatchers may live at the same time in a Reactive application. Same goes for the output handlers. Each of these are seen as plugins (which are gems) by Reactive, this let’s you construct an application architecture in a modular fashion.

Now that you know who does what, jump to the create a reactive 0.2.0 application article.

First Reactive Release (0.1.0)

2008-05-14T09:00:00Z

Remember Rails?

Yeah, of course. It's this famous Web framework with a bunch of cooked-in facilities.

Please welcome its alter-ego for desktop applications: Reactive

Remember Rails?

Yeah, of course. It's this famous Web framework with a bunch of cooked-in facilities.

Please welcome its alter-ego for desktop applications: Reactive

So what does reactive provide? It's a development framework for the Ruby language. It targets the desktop environment, so stop now if you are a HTML aficionados. It's built on the same architecture than rails: MVC. Thus, rails developers will feel at home.

Because choosing a GUI toolkit is a matter of taste, religion and also customer needs, reactive does not enforce the developer to use a dedicated toolkit. Enter the view provider system. The view is simply a layer that is not part of reactive but one of its plugins.

Hey, this sounds good, but I want to see some code!. Yeah, the code is hosted on RubyForge. You may already read the code, but wait for an upcoming post showing how to create a simple application.