telmux

Highly opiniated state management for TypeScript apps.

Introduction

Telmux is a very small reactive state management library that's heavily influenced by the ELM architecture. State is changed via Commands that are issued to the command stream of the Handler. It is upon you to provide the handler with an update function that is responsible for interpreting commands, providing updated state in a pure manner. Side-effects can be achieved by commands that don't change state, but run side-effects.

Telmux is agnostic about the Frontend framework you're using. It has been tested successfully with React and Vue and can provide a suitable and typesafe alternative to Redux or Vuex.

Usage

To implemented commands, it is recommened to use some kind of sum type. We suggest using the excellent Unionize library for that.

In the following code segment, we define our commands for a simple stopwatch application:

interface Time { minutes: number; seconds: number }
 
export const StopWatchCommands = unionize({
    Pause: {},
    Reset: ofType<Time>(),
    Start: {},
    Tick: {}
}, {value: "payload"});
 
export type StopWatchCommand = UnionOf<typeof StopWatchCommands>

To interpret these commands, an update-function is defined. We decide to make the stopwatch automatically go on pause as soon as it reaches 00:00 :

export const update = (model: Readonly<StopWatch>, send: (cmd:StopWatchCommand) => void, cmd: StopWatchCommand): StopWatch | void => 
StopWatchCommands.match(cmd, {
    Pause: () => ({...model, started: false}),
    Reset: (time: Time) => ({...model, minutes: time.minutes, seconds: time.seconds}),
    Start: () => ({...model, started: true}),
    Tick: () => {
        const seconds = model.seconds - 1 >= 0 ? model.seconds -1 : 59;    
        const minutes = model.seconds - 1 >= 0 ? model.minutes : model.minutes - 1;
        if ( seconds === 0 && minutes <= 0 ) { 
            send(StopWatchCommands.Pause()); 
        }
        return {seconds, minutes: minutes < 0 ? 0 : minutes, started: true};
    }
});

To issue commands, it is possible to extend the original handler class

export class StopWatchHandler extends Handler<StopWatchCommand, StopWatch> {
    private tickStream = interval( 1000, true );
 
    constructor(initialState: StopWatch) {
        super(initialState, update);
    }
 
    public start = () => {
        this.tickStream.onValue( this.tick );
        this.send(StopWatchCommands.Start());
    }
 
    public stop = () => {
        this.tickStream.offValue( this.tick );
        this.send(StopWatchCommands.Pause());
        this.send(StopWatchCommands.Reset({minutes: 1, seconds: 0}));
    }
 
    public pause = () => {
        this.tickStream.offValue( this.tick );
        this.send(StopWatchCommands.Pause());
    }
 
    private tick = (_: boolean) => this.send(StopWatchCommands.Tick());
}

You can use this class as a member in your frontend component. To couple your state with the component's state, it is possible to observe a stream of changing models (as shown here for react):

class App extends React.Component<{},StopWatch> {
 
  private handler : StopWatchHandler;
  constructor(props: any)
  {
    super(props);
    this.state = {minutes: 2, seconds: 0, started: false};
    this.handler = new StopWatchHandler(this.state);
    this.handler.modelStream.onValue( model => this.setState(model) );
  }
}