Small is Beautiful—The Component Library

For a while now I’ve been doing my Cassandra impersonation, telling everyone who’ll listen (and quite a few folks who won’t) that we need to be writing code in smaller chunks. I know what happens when we don’t, as I was the author of one of the largest early Rails applications (65kloc), and it became a nightmare to work with.

I don’t want the same thing to happen in the Elixir world. But if I’ve learned one thing, it’s that you can’t tell people that something is a good idea and expect them to do it.

No, you have to make it easier to do things the right way.

So, I’m releasing a first version of my Elixir Component library.

This library makes it easy to write code as servers (global, dynamic, pooled, and hungry consumer), and it makes it trivial to package these servers as self contained Elixir applications (so they can be used as dependencies in other applications).

For example, here’s a trivial key value store, written as a simple (nonserver) module:

defmodule KV do

  def create() do
    %{}
  end

  def add_entry(store, k, v) do
    Map.put(store, k, v)
  end

  def get_entry(store, k)
    Map.get(store, k)
  end
end

Call it like this:

iex> kv = KV.create
iex> KV.add_entry(kv, :name, "dave")
iex> KV.add_entry(kv, :language, "elixir")
iex> KV.get_entry(kv, :name)     # => "dave"

Let’s use the component framework to turn this into a freestanding component that can be added to any application as a dependency:

defmodule KV do

  use Component.Strategy.Dynamic,
      state_name: store,
      initial_state: %{},
      top_level: true

  def add_entry(store, k, v) do
    Map.put(store, k, v)
  end

  def get_entry(store, k)
    Map.get(store, k)
  end
end

Then update mix.exs to make KV your top-level application:

def application do
  [
    mod: { KV, [] },
    . . .
  ]
end

And run it from iex:

$ iex -S mix
iex> kv = KV.create
iex> KV.add_entry(kv, :name, "dave")
iex> KV.add_entry(kv, :language, "elixir")
iex> KV.get_entry(kv, :name)     # => "dave"

It runs as a supervised application with a dynamic supervisor managing the individual server processes.

Anyway, the philosophy of all this is not to save on typing. Instead the intent is to nudge people into writing their programs using lots of small, independent components, linked via dependencies. That’s how I’ve been coding for the last year or so, and so far I’m really, really liking it.

Check out Component on github