flitbit / fbwireup

FlitBit Wireup - tools for declaring and coordinating boostrap activities in dotNet applications.

fbwireup - FlitBit Wireup

Tools for declaring and coordinating bootstrap activities in dotNet applications.

Summary

FlitBit Wireup formalizes bootstrap processes by providing the ability to declare dependencies among assemblies and coordinate the tasks that bring an assembly to a ready-state.

It deals with the dependency among libraries, not dependency injection or inversion of control. Those concerns are covered by many libraries in the open-source community, including FlitBit IoC which scaffolds on top of this library.

Visit the Core library's repository to learn more about FlitBit Frameworks.

Background

It may appear that we use the term wireup and bootstrap interchangeably, but it is not so. Bootstrap refers to the period between when the program is launched and when it becomes ready. We use the term wireup to refer to the more abstract phase that repeats throughout the life of a modern application as different modules are loaded just-in-time and must be made ready.

Too often, applications either devise custom bootstrap processes and end up with hard-coded dependency logic; yet others rely on a mix of cusotm logic parts and inversion of control to achieve a ready-state. In the latter case, relying on an IoC container is a good move, but this library's purpose is to introduce a reusable convention for the other part; logic and tasks required to bring a module to its initial ready-state.

As an illustration of the coupling FlitBit Wireup intends to modularize, take most ASP.net applications. They tend to centralize too much logic in the HttpApplication's Application_Start method, essentially creating a know-it-all bootstrapper. We have learned through much tribulation to prefer a modular, decentralized approach for our applications.

The approach we take leads to modularity not only in packaging capability, but also in configuring it.

1. Each module should declare its own dependencies.

• In this way, a coordinator can ensure that all dependencies are met before each module is wired into an application.

2. If a module has logic that must be performed in order to bring itself to a ready-state, it must declare one or more wireup tasks that perform the required logic.

• In this way, when the coordinator wires a module into an application, it can ensure that the tasks are performed in the proper, declared order, and thereby reach certainty that the module has reached a ready-state without ever having to know the module's purpose.

In contrast to the know-it-all model, modules can be easily wired into a running application on demand, reducing the start-up time and eliminating the wireup logic for areas of the application that are unused.

\\ TODO: Copious examples