TroopJS is around the component concept, component is the building block that influences your way of thinking about how application is built, application is grown by augmenting with more components.
Components are typically categorized into two types, that are either widgets that interact with the UI, or services that works behind the scene for serving requests.
Components are no more than regular AMD module that exports the constructor function to instantiate component object. A component is created by extending from any existing component in TroopJS, to exemplify we're
to extend from
troopjs-core/component/base - the very basis ancestor component, passing in a function which serves as the constructor (no new keyword when creating the component), and one or more specs object, whose
properties will be mixed into the component properties. So far your ever familiarized JavaScript concepts.
To distinguish with regular JavaScript object, components in TroopJS has life cycle, which provides component the flexibility to behave differently based on the which phase it is currently in, one example is a DOM component that is instantiated would neither listen to DOM events nor to render until the component is eventually attached to DOM tree, or even complicated precondition like waiting for server data to be loaded.
Since constructor can only create component the synchronous way, an asynchronous procedure of "activating" a component is referred in TroopJS as "starting", which is basically specials that transit component phases from "initialize" to eventually "started", eventually consider the component activated.
In above example, the special sig/start method sends an asynchronous ajax request which yields a promise, which is returned to the call of component#start, we are telling TroopJS to trigger the component's start
phase and wait for the completion of the ajax request, eventually the component enters "started" phase.
The sig/start method we used in the above section isn't a regular function, it's the signature of specials in TroopJS, which are generally event handlers that are not part of component's object property
but static functions created on the constructor, they're to be invoked when corresponding events are emitted.
Specials prefixed with sig are "signals" that are handlers primarily for framework's internal events, like component's life-cycle change. Signal's usage are not limited to the framework, it's also suitable
for inventing extension points of a component that can be optionally handled by the implementation.
Special like signals are distinguished from a regular method not only from it's signature, but also the fact that these methods when overriding in a hierarchical components tree where multiple specials share the same name, the overridden component's special function are always called ahead of the special from the base component.
Service is component extends from troopjs-core/component/service that exist primarily to serve other component's hub requests. Services are typically started when boostraping the application.
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