Cassowary Coffee

A CoffeeScript port of the Cassowary constraint solving toolkit.

Cassowary can be used to write declarative, constraint-based layouts. See for example OS X Lion's Autolayout system.

The primary design goal of this project is a JavaScript Cassowary implementation compatible with Google's Closure compiler's advanced mode. We're translating the original Cassowary authors' JavaScript port to CoffeeScript and using Michael Bolin's CoffeeScript fork to generate Closure-friendly JavaScript.

This project is currently on the back-burner for me. You may want to check out Alex Russell's JavaScript Cassowary which is under more active development and has a number of serious performance improvements compared to this naive translation.

Using from ClojureScript

Add to your project.clj:

[com.keminglabs/cassowary "0.1.0"]

and add "cassowaryjs" to the ClojureScript compiler :libs option so it looks like this:

(closure/build "my/cljs/src" {:optimizations :advanced
                              :libs ["cassowaryjs"]})

Using Cassowary from ClojureScript costs about 18KB in advanced mode.

Example usage

(ns cassowary-demo
  (:refer-clojure :exclude [+ - * =])
  (:use [cassowary.core :only [+ - = * cvar value constrain! unconstrain! simplex-solver]]))

(defn *print-fn* [x] (.log js/console x))

(let [solver  (simplex-solver)
      vars    (for [_ (range 5)] (cvar 0))]

  ;;Relation between consecutive pairs of variables
  (doseq [[a b] (partition 2 1 vars)]
    (constrain! solver (= b (* 2 a))))
  
  (let [c1 (= 1 (first vars))
        c2 (= -5 (first vars))]
    
    (constrain! solver c1)
    (print (pr-str (map value vars))) ;=> (1 2 4 8 16)
    
    (unconstrain! solver c1)
    (constrain! solver c2)
    (print (pr-str (map value vars))))) ;=> (-5 -10 -20 -40 -80)

Install

Development requires node.js for the CoffeeScript compiler and the Jasmine testing library Assuming you have node installed, get the code via

git clone https://github.com/lynaghk/cassowary-coffee.git
git submodule update --init
npm install jasmine-node

Build

Run the super-simple build script:

./make.sh

This will download the Closure compiler to vendor/closure-compiler.jar if it's not there already.

After you've built the Cassowary library JavaScript, try the samples:

vendor/coffee-script/bin/coffee   \
  --google                        \
  --compile                       \
  --output out/samples samples/

and test them out by opening samples/samples.html in your browser.

Test

jasmine-node --coffee spec/

TODO

• Multiarity multiplication
• ClojureScript wrappers for simple editing of variable values.
• Design ClojureScript protocol for simpler usage (e.g., IPositionable).
• Moar samples!