behaviors.diviner

@title Concepts: Behaviors
@group concepts

Javelin behaviors help you glue pieces of code together.

= Overview =

Javelin behaviors provide a place for you to put glue code. For instance, when
a page loads, you often need to instantiate objects, or set up event listeners,
or alert the user that they've won a hog, or create a dependency between two
objects, or modify the DOM, etc.

Sometimes there's enough code involved here or a particular setup step happens
often enough that it makes sense to write a class, but sometimes it's just a
few lines of one-off glue. Behaviors give you a structured place to put this
glue so that it's consistently organized and can benefit from Javelin
infrastructure.

= Behavior Basics =

Behaviors are defined with @{function:JX.behavior}:

  lang=js
  JX.behavior('win-a-hog', function(config, statics) {
    alert("YOU WON A HOG NAMED " + config.hogName + "!");
  });

They are called with @{function:JX.initBehaviors}:

  lang=js
  JX.initBehaviors({
    "win-a-hog" : [{hogName : "Ethel"}]
  });

Normally, you don't construct the @{function:JX.initBehaviors} call yourself,
but instead use a server-side library which manages behavior initialization for
you. For example, using the PHP library:

  lang=php
  $config = array('hogName' => 'Ethel');
  JavelinHelper::initBehaviors('win-a-hog', $config);

Regardless, this will alert the user that they've won a hog (named Ethel, which
is a good name for a hog) when they load the page.

The callback you pass to @{function:JX.behavior} should have this signature:

  lang=js
  function(config, statics) {
    // ...
  }

The function will be invoked once for each configuration dictionary passed to
@{function:JX.initBehaviors}, and the dictionary will be passed as the
##config## parameter. For example, to alert the user that they've won two hogs:

  lang=js
  JX.initBehaviors({
    "win-a-hog" : [{hogName : "Ethel"}, {hogName: "Beatrice"}]
  });

This will invoke the function twice, once for each ##config## dictionary.
Usually, you invoke a behavior multiple times if you have several similar
controls on a page, like multiple @{class:JX.Tokenizer}s.

An initially empty object will be passed in the ##statics## parameter, but
changes to this object will persist across invocations of the behavior. For
example:

  lang=js
  JX.initBehaviors('win-a-hog', function(config, statics) {
    statics.hogsWon = (statics.hogsWon || 0) + 1;

    if (statics.hogsWon == 1) {
      alert("YOU WON A HOG! YOUR HOG IS NAMED " + config.hogName + "!");
    } else {
      alert("YOU WON ANOTHER HOG!!! THIS ONE IS NAMED " + config.hogName + "!");
    }
  }

One way to think about behaviors are that they take the anonymous function
passed to @{function:JX.behavior} and put it in a private Javelin namespace,
which you access with @{function:JX.initBeahvior}.

Another way to think about them is that you are defining methods which represent
the entirety of the API exposed by the document. The recommended approach to
glue code is that the server interact with Javascript on the client //only// by
invoking behaviors, so the set of available behaviors represent the complete set
of legal interactions available to the server.

= History and Rationale =

This section explains why behaviors exist and how they came about. You can
understand and use them without knowing any of this, but it may be useful or
interesting.

In early 2007, Facebook often solved the "glue code" problem through the use
of global functions and DOM Level 0 event handlers, by manually building HTML
tags in PHP:

  lang=php
  echo '<a href="#" '.
       'onclick="win_a_hog('.escape_js_string($hog_name).'); return false;">'.
       'Click here to win!'.
       '</a>';

(This example produces a link which the user can click to be alerted they have
won a hog, which is slightly different from the automatic alert in the other
examples in this document. Some subtle distinctions are ignored or glossed
over here because they are not important to understanding behaviors.)

This has a wide array of technical and architectural problems:

  - Correctly escaping parameters is cumbersome and difficult.
  - It resists static analysis, and is difficult to even grep for. You can't
    easily package, minify, or determine dependencies for the piece of JS in
    the result string.
  - DOM Level 0 events have a host of issues in a complex application
    environment.
  - The JS global namespace becomes polluted with application glue functions.
  - The server and client are tightly and relatively arbitrarily coupled, since
    many of these handlers called multiple functions or had logic in the
    strings. There is no structure to the coupling, so many callers relied on
    the full power of arbitrary JS execution.
  - It's utterly hideous.

In 2007/2008, we introduced @{function@libphutil:jsprintf} and a function called
onloadRegister() to solve some of the obvious problems:

  lang=php
  onloadRegister('win_a_hog(%s);', $hog_name);

This registers the snippet for invocation after DOMContentReady fires. This API
makes escaping manageable, and was combined with recommendations to structure
code like this in order to address some of the other problems:

  lang=php
  $id = uniq_id();
  echo '<a href="#" id="'.$id.'">Click here to win!</a>';
  onloadRegister('new WinAHogController(%s, %s);', $id, $hog_name);

By 2010 (particularly with the introduction of XHP) the API had become more
sophisticated, but this is basically how most of Facebook's glue code still
works as of mid-2011. If you view the source of any page, you'll see a bunch
of ##onloadRegister()## calls in the markup which are generated like this.

This mitigates many of the problems but is still fairly awkward. Escaping is
easier, but still possible to get wrong. Stuff is a bit easier to grep for, but
not much. You can't get very far with static analysis unless you get very
complex. Coupling between the languages has been reduced but not eliminated. And
now you have a bunch of classes which only really have glue code in them.

Javelin behaviors provide a more structured solution to some of these problems:

  - All your Javascript code is in Javascript files, not embedded in strings in
    in some host language on the server side.
  - You can use static analysis and minification tools normally.
  - Provided you use a reasonable server-side library, you can't get escaping
    wrong.
  - Coupling is reduced because server only passes data to the client, never
    code.
  - The server declares client dependencies explicitly, not implicitly inside
    a string literal. Behaviors are also relatively easy to grep for.
  - Behaviors exist in a private, structured namespace instead of the global
    namespace.
  - Separation between the document's layout and behavior is a consequence of
    the structure of behaviors.
  - The entire interface the server may invoke against can be readily inferred.

Note that Javelin does provide @{function:JX.onload}, which behaves like
##onloadRegister()##. However, its use is discouraged.

The two major downsides to the behavior design appear to be:

  - They have a higher setup cost than the ad-hoc methods, but Javelin
    philosophically places a very low value on this.
  - Because there's a further setup cost to migrate an existing behavior into a
    class, behaviors sometimes grow little by little until they are too big,
    have more than just glue code, and should have been refactored into a
    real class some time ago. This is a pretty high-level drawback and is
    manageable through awareness of the risk and code review.