Problem
Most web frameworks start out clean and friendly, but at some point after you go on to build a real-life application on them they stop cooperating and start turning against you. Finding an honorable route for solving a problem is now a luxury, workarounds are the norm.
This can happen over and over. Slick at first, unmaintainable in 2 years. But why is that, why is complexity proportional to the number of features added?
Two reasons:
- Interdependence. Tie a number of units together, rely on one to change the state of another and you successfully gave birth to an unpredictable ecosystem
- Data obscurity. Mixing data with logic turns any transparent river of data into a muddy sewage network and generates a big pile of opinionated, disposable code.
Avoiding these pitfalls upfront is difficult. They occur only after you've reached a certain maturity in a program. Easy to notice once the code is no longer pleasant to work with, but very hard to predict.
Cosmos fights against this uncertainty by surfacing the elements that don't benefit from a natural tendency to scale.
Working with so many entities builds complex relationships. Models, Controllers, Views, Helpers, etc., they're all connected to each other in various ways. Your application is the outcome of all sorts of objects with different roles and behaviors depending on one another.
Scaling you app linearly requires a flat infrastructure. Responsibilities should translate into domain logic instead of low-level roles (data modeling, rendering, etc.)
Cosmos only has one entity: The Component. They are autonomous, have end-to-end capabilities and each can function as a complete application by itself, excluding interdependence from the start. Because they can describe their output without relying on any external logic, components are declarative and predictable.
Isolating the source of a bug now has O(1) complexity.
Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.
Cosmos is partly inspired by a Linus Torvalds comment about designing your code around your data and not the other way around.
But Cosmos does not impose any specific data structures, it simply makes them surface and hard to miss. All component logic wraps around a single JSON object, which starts as the component input and updates along with state changes. That object will always be a visible, persistent data structure.