Zds.Flow 0.1.3

Zds.Flow

A library to control the flow of program is a completely different way. This library can be used as partial replacement of old Asynchronous system in .Net.

You can design applications with massive parallelism without dealing with thread safety. You can create applications completely detached from UI. You can easily and safely interact with it.

There are four major namespaces in library:

• Updaters (Objects that create threads, Acts as ThreadPool)
• Updatables (Objects that use threads created by Updaters)
• Collections (Contains different Thread Safe/Unsafe collections)
• Machinery (Used to design a graph that controls the flow of objects)

Things to Remember

1. Every objects that implements IStartStopable interface will not work unless you Start it. Every Updater/Updatable object implements IStartStopable interface. So you have to start them manually. You can stop them by calling Stop. You can check object status by using IStartStopable.IsRunning property.
2. An Updatable object will never work without an Updater. By default there is a global Updater that is assigned to Updatable if Updater is not given. You can assign an Updater to an Updateable by setting Updatable.Updater or calling Updater.Add(). You can get all Updatables assigned to an Updater by using Updater.Targets property.
3. A thread safe collection has prefix Safe in its name. So be careful when using collections in Asynchronous objects or in a Machinery.
4. Objects that have managed/unmanaged resources implement IDisposable. You can check if an object is disposed by calling *.IsDisposed.
5. Objects that throw exceptions implement IThrowsException interface. These objects have event OnException. You can use this event to keep track of exceptions. You can even create an ExceptionHandler and add your IThrowsException object to it.

Updatables

Updatables are objects that implement IUpdatable. These objects have method Update() that is recursively called by an Updater assigned to it. It is not fixed how fast or delayed the method will be called. So, it should be handled by Updatable. All Updatables implement IDisposable IThrowsException and IStartStopable.

Every object in Updatable namespace has at least one overridable object that can be overridden to define the behaviour of object. You can also do it by passing pointer of a method of same signature through constructor to define behaviour. You can also use associated event. So, inheritance is not MUST.

Here is the list of all Updatables and their functionalities.

Machinery

All objects in Machinery namespace implement ISink. A Sink is like a function that takes an input and behaves on the basis of input. ISink<T> has method Send(T obj) that lets any code send an object to sink. A Sink can also send object to other Sink and can make an execution graph. All objects in Machinery inherit classes from Updatables. They combine functionality of Sink and Updatable. Updatable behaviour allows it to execute parallel, (independent of sender), while Sink allows functionality to receive objects or batch of objects.