1. THE
ARCHITECT
WAY
Jan Jongboom
JSCamp.asia
November 30, 2012, Singapore

2. @janjongboom

3. Program
• Cloud9? 5 minute intro + what's new
• Problems growing your codebase
• Introducing: Architect!
• Lessons learned

4. Normal developers

5. JavaScript Developer

6. OPPA
CLOUD9 STYLE

9. Smart code completion

10. Static analysis

11. Free Linux machine

12. Real terminal

13. Program
• Cloud9? 5 minute intro + what's new
• Problems growing your codebase
• Introducing: Architect!
• Lessons learned

14. Hundreds of thousands
of lines of JavaScript
(with semicolons ;-))

15. dynamic
weakly-typed
language

16. one single thread

18. Modularization

19. Black box coding

21. Great at abstracting away

22. Not that good at
app level abstraction

23. Relies on filesystem
• Duplicated modules
• Maps to folder / file name
• Hard to configure

24. Dependency error handling
coding time startup time run time
!
OM
- BO
KA
- Server crash
- Unhappy customers
- Developer gets fired

25. Program
• Cloud9? 5 minute intro + what's new
• Problems growing your codebase
• Introducing: Architect!
• Lessons learned

26. Architect
• Every piece of functionality is a plugin
• Plugins can consume other plugins
• An application is a set of plugins

27. Require Runtime
Architect Startup time

28. Dependency error handling
Architect style
coding time compile time run time
- Happy customers
- Developer keeps
- Fails before release job

29. Here’s what we do
• Code representation of this talk
• Get a speaker from the database
• Talk, talk, talk
• And end with a dance

35. Group functions
by behavior

36. Datalayer
Presentation

37. Dependency model
Datalayer Presentation

38. package.json
Builds dependency tree
without
executing code

39. data-­‐layer/package.json
presentation/package.json

40. What’s next?
• Extract the code
• Wrap in Architect plugin code
• It’s simple!
• Make two plugins

41. Function signature
Call when done

42. Architect plugin code
• Options, will get to that
• Imports, everything you consume
• Register, invoke when done

46. Dependencies
abstracted away
• Easily unit testable
• Mock dependencies
• Assert ‘talk’ function is called 5 times

51. No black magic
• Architect builds dependency model
• Feed architect a list of plugins
• Simple array with file names
• Call ‘createApp’

55. Configuration
• Per-plugin options
• No global options object
• Specify in config file

58. Options
• Automatically passed in at startup
• Options are also dependencies
• Fail if options aren’t present
• Use default assertions

61. Architect makes you think of
your app as
chunks of functionality
rather than sets of classes

62. Think
‘chunks of functionality’
• Implicit type constraints
• Keep implementation private
• Swap feature implementations
• Rather than interface implementations

63. How do we use it?
• Open source version
• Hosted version
• Normal
• FTP
• SSH

65. Swap feature per
implementation
• On Open source: talk local filesystem
• On FTP: talk FTP library
• On SSH: log in and talk via a SSH bridge

66. HERE’S SOMETHING
COOL

67. Centralized eventbus
• Loose coupling between plugins
• No hard dependencies!
• Can also do inter-context communication

68. React on event
Other plugin
Eventbus
Emit event
Plugin

71. And now scale up
• Need something inter-server
• Swap it with i.e. Redis PubSub
• Plugins will never notice
• Awesome!

72. Program
• Cloud9? 5 minute intro + what's new
• Problems growing your codebase
• Introducing: Architect!
• Lessons learned

73. Modularize in feature
blocks
• Don’t over engineer
• Don’t create too small blocks
• They are no interfaces!

74. Avoid context switching
• Less code!
• Less errors!
• Less boilerplate!

75. Loose coupling
• Eventbus
• Smaller dependency graph

76. github.com/c9/architect

77. Happy coding!

78. http://c9.io
Jan Jongboom
github.com/janjongboom
@janjongboom