re-frame

re-frame is a lightweight reagent framework for writing SPAs using ClojureScript.

It proposes a pattern for structuring an app, and provides a small library implementing one version of this pattern.

In another context, re-frame might be called an MVC framework, except it is instead a functional RACES framework - Reactive-Atom Component Event Subscription (I love the smell of acronym in the morning).

Claims

Nothing about re-frame is the slightest bit original or clever. You'll find no ingenious use of functional zippers, transducers or core.async. This is a good thing (although, for the record, one day I'd love to develop something original and clever).

Using re-frame, you can break your application code into distinct pieces. Each of these pieces can be easily described, understood and tested independently. These pieces will (mostly) be pure functions.

At small scale, any framework seems like pesky overhead. The explanatory examples in here are small scale, so you'll need to squint a little to see the benefit.

Shaping Beliefs

Above all we believe in the one true Dan Holmsand (creator of reagent), and his divine instrument the ratom. We genuflect towards Sweden once a day.

Second, because paradigm is worth 80 points of IQ, we think you'll only really "get" Reagent once you view it as an FRP library, and not simply a ReactJS wrapper. To put that another way, we think that Reagent is closer in nature to Hoplon or Elm than it is OM. This wasn't obvious to us initially - we knew we liked reagent, but it took a while for the penny to drop as to why.

Finally, we believe in one way data flow. We don't like read/write cursors which allow for the two way flow of data.

re-frame implements the two way flow of data into and out of views by using two, one-way flows.

The Parts

To explain re-frame, we'll now incrementally develop a diagram. We'll explain each part as it is added in.

The Big Ratom

Well-formed Data at rest is as close to perfection in programming as it gets. All the crap that had to happen to put it there however...

— Fogus (@fogus) April 11, 2014

Our re-frame diagram starts with the "well formed data at rest" bit:

ratom

So, re-frame says that you should put your data into one, dirty great big atom. Structure the data in that atom, of course, but put it all in the one place.

Now, its not the slightest bit controversial to use databases, right? And they encourage you to put your well formed data all in one place. But if you have background in OO, this data-in-one-place is a hard one to swallow. You've spent your life breaking systems into pieces, organised around behaviour and trying to hide the data. I still wake up in a sweat some nights thinking about all that clojure data lying around exposed and passive.

But, as @Fogus says, data is the easy bit.

From here on, we'll assume that this part of the framework looks like this:

(def ratom  (reagent/atom {}))    ;; a reagent atom, containing a map

It is useful to actively imagine our ratom as an (in memory) database. It will contain structured data (perhaps with a formal Prismatic Schema definition). You will need to query that data. You will perform CRUD and other transformations on it. You'll often want to transact on this database atomically, etc. So "in-memory database" seems a more useful paradigm than plain old atom. In our implementation, we actually use the name db to drive home the point.

Finally, ratom doesn't actually have to be a ratom containing a map. re-frame imposes no requirement here. It could be a datascript database. Its just a datastore of some description.

Magic Ratoms

ratoms have a key feature. They act like normal clojurescript atoms, plus they allow you to create reactive functions similar to lift in Elm or defc= in hoplon. You create these reactive functions via the reagent macros reaction or run!.

(ns example1
  (:require-macros [reagent.ratom :refer [reaction]])
  (:require
    [reagent.core   :as    r]))
    
(def ratom1  (r/atom {:a 1}))

(def ratom2  (reaction {:b (:a @ratom1)}))           ;; notice use of "reaction"
(def ratom3  (reaction (cond = (:a @ratom1)          ;; notice use of "reaction"
                             0 "World"
                             1 "Hello")))         

(println @ratom2)    ;; ==>  {:b 1}
(println @ratom3)    ;; ==> "Hello"
(reset!  ratom1  {:a 0})
(println @ratom2)    ;; ==>  {:b 0}    ;; ratom2 is automatically updated.
(println @ratom3)    ;; ==> "World"    ;; ratom3 is automatically updated.
    
;; cleanup 
(dispose ratom2)
(dispose ratom3)

reaction is a macro which turns returns a ratom. It takes the the forms supplied and turns them into the body of a reactive function. This function will be rerun each time one of the ratoms referenced in the forms changes, and the returned atom will be reset! with the new result. Over time, ratom2 and ratom3 are auto-updated each time ratom1 changes. This enables FRP (its similar in affect to lift in Elm).

The Components

Extending the diagram a bit, we introduce the beginnings of one way data flow:

ratom -->  components --> hiccup

When using reagent, you write one or more components. Think about components as pure functions - data in, hiccup out. [hiccup] is ClojureScript data structures which represent DOM.

These components are a bit like the templates you'd find in frameworks like Django or Rails or Mustache, except for two massive differences:

• you have available the full power of ClojureScript. The downside tradeoff is that these are not "designer friendly" HTML templates.
• these components are reactive. When their inputs change, they are automatically rerun, producing new hiccup. reagent adroitly shields you from the details, but components (functions you write) are wrapped by reaction in such a way that they re-run when the ratoms they dereference change. This is FRP. This is why reagent feels slightly magic.

So components are pure, reactive functions. Change the inputs and automatically, new hiccup is produced.

This is not a tutorial on how to write reagent components, but let's talk briefly about the "data in" bit. Turns out there are two ways data flows into components:

1. the data is supplied as component parameters, typically from a parent component. There tends to be a hierarchy of components and data often flows from parent to child via function parameters.

2. a component can 'subscribe' to some aspect of the data. As a result, it becomes an observer of that state, and it gets an stream of data updates as that part of the ratom changes.

Either way, when the "data in" changes, the component function is rerun, and it produces new hiccup, which is then stitched into the DOM.

Subscriptions are a significant part of re-frame ... more on them soon.

ReactJS

So let's complete the data flow from data to DOM:

ratom  -->  components --> Hiccup --> Reagent --> VDOM  -->  ReactJS  --> DOM

Best to imagine this process as a pipeline of 3 functions. Each function takes data from the previous step, and produces data for the next step. In the next diagram, the three functions are marked. Unmarked nodes are data, produced by one step, becoming the input to the next step. hiccup, VDOM and DOM are all various forms of HTML markup (in our world that's data).

ratom  -->  components --> hiccup --> Reagent --> VDOM  -->  ReactJS  --> DOM
               f1                      f2                     f3

The combined three-function pipeline should be seen as a pure function P which takes a ratom as input, and produces DOM. One way data flow:

ratom  -->  P  --> DOM

We only need to design and write the ratom and components, and reagent, which wraps ReactJS, manages the rest.

Event Flow

So now we need to consider the flow in the opposite direction.

In response to user interaction, a DOM will generate events like "the user clicked the delete button on item 42" or "the user unticked the checkbox for 'send me spam'".

These events have to "handled". The code which does the handling might mutate the ratom, or kick-off some async I/O, etc.

An app will have many, many such handlers, and collectively they represent the control layer of the application.

The backward data flow happens in one (conveyor belt) hop:

ratom  -->  components --> Hiccup --> Reagent --> VDOM  -->  ReactJS  --> DOM
  ^                                                                        |
  |                                                                        v
  handlers <------------  [events]  ---------------------------------------
                           a conveyor belt takes
                           events from the DOM to
                           the handlers.

Generally, the user manipulates the GUI so as to change the state of the application. That almost always means the ratom will be changed. After all the ratom is the state. The DOM presented is a function of that state. The GUI never changes until the ratom changes.

So handlers are the part of the system which does ratom mutation. You could almost imagine them as a "stored procedure" in a database. Kinda, almost. Stretching it? We do like our in-memory database analogies.

What are events?

Events are data. You choose the format.

Our implementation copies from Pedestal App and packages events as vectors. For example:

[:delete-item 42]

Here, the first item in the vector identifies the event which occurred and and the rest of the vector are the parameters -- the id of the item to delete in this case.

Here are some other events:

  [:set-spam-wanted false]
  [[:complicated :multi :part :key] "a parameter" "another one"  45.6]

The DOM

We say the DOM "dispatches" events.

Events are then routed to the right handler via a conveyor belt. Remember, an event is just data. And it is flowing in the opposite direction to the data which causes the DOm to be rendered in the first place.

and routed to the right handler.

So here's what a

Events

Once we've displayed a GUi to a user, and they start to interact with it.