Introduction

ActiveJS strives to be a pragmatic, reactive state management solution for JavaScript apps.

ActiveJS' reactivity is based on RxJS Observable, hence, you can take full advantage of RxJS operators.

It's built around reactive data structures called Units that resemble JavaScript's native data structures but are much more powerful. All these feature-packed reactive data structures share the following qualities:

• Observable value

• Reactive value mutation

• Type-safety

• Cache-enabled

• Optionally Immutable

• Optionally Persistent

These Units help you share data among different parts of an app with minimum code and effort. Furthermore, ActiveJS helps in streamlining asynchronous data APIs like XHR, fetch, or third party abstractions like Angular's HttpClient or axios, etc.

Installation

If you don't have RxJS installed already, you'll need to install it first npm install rxjs, and then

npm i @activejs/core

Quick Example

This is how an implementation of a simple "counter" looks like, using a NumUnit, one of the reactive data structures that ActiveJS provides. The NumUnit stores and provides a number value at all times ensuring the type-safety.

// initialize a reactive data structure to store numbers
const counter = new NumUnit() // with default initial-value 0

// two pure functions to produce an appropriate new value
const increment = value => value + 1 
const decrement = value => value - 1

// subscribe for reactive value access, and log the value
counter.subscribe(value => console.log(value))
// immediately logs 0, and will log any future values

// increment
counter.dispatch(increment); // you'll see 1 in the console
// the pure function is called with the current value and
// the returned value is dispatched automatically

// decrement
counter.dispatch(decrement); // you'll see 0 in the console
// that's it our counter is complete

// you can also access the value directly
console.log(counter.value()) // logs 0

You never have to worry if the value of this counter is number or not, the NumUnit will ensure that it's a number, it'll ignore any non-number value dispatch. We'll talk about it in detail later.

Quick Comparisons

A "counter" implemented in vanilla Redux vs ActiveJS. It's not a fair comparison because a NumUnit can do so much more alone, and Redux is powerful in its own way. But it is what it is.

Redux vs ActiveJS

It's hard to Compare with NgRx without involving Angular, but for argument's sake let's pretend that this stripped-down code is valid.

NgRx vs ActiveJS

Quick Overview

The following data-flow diagram roughly shows where ActiveJS comes into play. ActiveJS holds the state and every other part of the application directly shares it without any obscure façade.

A very high level data-flow diagram of an App using ActiveJS.

ActiveJS is fully fuzz-tested with 99.99% code-coverage.

ActiveJS is really small in size, and it's tree-shakeable too. Also, there're no reducers, no middleware, and not even a store for that matter. It's much simpler than that.