Why didn’t you use a framework for ubui’s core?

Good question buddy! So here’s the answer;

When I was thinking about how I should build ubui I had loads of ideas (and most of them were pretty zaney!) so I prototyped most of them and left it a few days so I could come back with fresh eyes and really assess the best option.

I prototyped with JavaScript MVC, Spine, bare JS (Using named JSON objects) and modular (kind of OOP but not quite there)

After much deliberation and toying with the most basic part of the ubui core I settled on a mixture of named JSON objects and modular JS, and here’s why:

I knew ubui’s core would be small and light and from the get go I didn’t want it to be big or hard to work with for extending. Once I’d sorted the auto loading of the framework and modules/dependancies I’d settled on a very small, very fast, very easy to understand structure where most of the modules are JSON objects assigned to module.exports and named in an index file for the ubuim’s (the modules are called ubuim’s) so they stay named and obvious to understand (always reference to the modules in the index file) and the framework models are generally assigned as anonymous functions to pre-process cli arguments before performing a selected action.

Take a look at the below example of the users module to understand more about why I’d use both styles (I promise it makes sense)

this.exec({
	"command": command,
	"success": function (a) {
		console.log('success');
		console.log(a);
	},
	"error": function (a, b) {
		console.log('error');
		console.log(a);
	}
}).run();

in the above example, exec is a framework model which is an anonymous function rather than a JSON object containing functions. Its an anonymous function so I can pass it arguments to set internally without the need for another method in-between exec and run which speeds up the loading and running of commands since we’re already going to be waiting for the shell to respond to us as well as checking we’re not running anything naughty.

The model will also return itself so its a circular reference thus making it both assignable and chain-able, you can also dump out the entire object for debugging (which was super handy)

I know a lot of people say frameworks standardise the structure of an application but that, in my eyes, doesn’t apply here since its such a simple structure and so simple to extend I have no plans to move over to any kind of framework either as there is no need to complicate or bloat the app.

And that my friend is why I didn’t use a framework for ubui’s core.