mirror of
https://github.com/Jermolene/TiddlyWiki5
synced 2024-11-24 10:37:20 +00:00
5f6be2b5c7
Which turns out to be entirely a matter of inserting additional blank lines, which has the beneficial effect of making the wikitext a lot more readable
69 lines
4.0 KiB
Plaintext
69 lines
4.0 KiB
Plaintext
title: PluginMechanism
|
|
tags: internals
|
|
|
|
!Introduction
|
|
|
|
TiddlyWiki5 is based on a 500 line boot kernel that runs on node.js or in the browser, and everything else is plugins.
|
|
|
|
The kernel boots just enough of the TiddlyWiki environment to allow it to load tiddlers as plugins and execute them (a barebones tiddler class, a barebones wiki store class, some utilities etc.). Plugin modules are written like `node.js` modules; you can use `require()` to invoke sub components and to control load order.
|
|
|
|
There are several different types of plugins: parsers, serializers, deserializers, macros etc. It goes much further than you might expect. For example, individual tiddler fields are plugins, too: there's a plugin that knows how to handle the `tags` field, and another that knows how to handle the special behaviour of
|
|
the `modified` and `created` fields.
|
|
|
|
Some plugins have further sub-plugins: the wikitext parser, for instance, accepts rules as individual plugins.
|
|
|
|
!Plugins and Modules
|
|
|
|
In TiddlyWiki5, a plugin is a bundle of related tiddlers that are distributed together as a single unit. Plugins can include tiddlers which are JavaScript modules.
|
|
|
|
The file `core/boot.js` is a barebones TiddlyWiki kernel that is just sufficient to load the core plugin modules and trigger a startup plugin module to load up the rest of the application.
|
|
|
|
The kernel includes:
|
|
|
|
* Eight short shared utility functions
|
|
* Three methods implementing the plugin module mechanism
|
|
* The `$tw.Tiddler` class (and three field definition plugins)
|
|
* The `$tw.Wiki` class (and three tiddler deserialization methods)
|
|
* Code for the browser to load tiddlers from the HTML DOM
|
|
* Code for the server to load tiddlers from the file system
|
|
|
|
Each module is an ordinary `node.js`-style module, using the `require()` function to access other modules and the `exports` global to return JavaScript values. The boot kernel smooths over the differences between `node.js` and the browser, allowing the same plugin modules to execute in both environments.
|
|
|
|
In the browser, `core/boot.js` is packed into a template HTML file that contains the following elements in order:
|
|
|
|
* Ordinary and shadow tiddlers, packed as HTML `<DIV>` elements
|
|
* `core/bootprefix.js`, containing a few lines to set up the plugin environment
|
|
* Plugin JavaScript modules, packed as HTML `<SCRIPT>` blocks
|
|
* `core/boot.js`, containing the boot kernel
|
|
|
|
On the server, `core/boot.js` is executed directly. It uses the `node.js` local file API to load plugins directly from the file system in the `core/modules` directory. The code loading is performed synchronously for brevity (and because the system is in any case inherently blocked until plugins are loaded).
|
|
|
|
The boot kernel sets up the `$tw` global variable that is used to store all the state data of the system.
|
|
|
|
!Core
|
|
|
|
The 'core' is the boot kernel plus the set of plugin modules that it loads. It contains plugins of the following types:
|
|
|
|
* `tiddlerfield` - defines the characteristics of tiddler fields of a particular name
|
|
* `tiddlerdeserializer` - methods to extract tiddlers from text representations or the DOM
|
|
* `startup` - functions to be called by the kernel after booting
|
|
* `global` - members of the `$tw` global
|
|
* `config` - values to be merged over the `$tw.config` global
|
|
* `utils` - general purpose utility functions residing in `$tw.utils`
|
|
* `tiddlermethod` - additional methods for the `$tw.Tiddler` class
|
|
* `wikimethod` - additional methods for the `$tw.Wiki` class
|
|
* `treeutils` - static utility methods for parser tree nodes
|
|
* `treenode` - classes of parser tree nodes
|
|
* `macro` - macro definitions
|
|
* `editor` - interactive editors for different types of content
|
|
* `parser` - parsers for different types of content
|
|
* `wikitextrule` - individual rules for the wikitext parser
|
|
* `command` - individual commands for the `$tw.Commander` class
|
|
|
|
TiddlyWiki5 makes extensive use of JavaScript inheritance:
|
|
|
|
* Tree nodes defined in `$:/core/treenodes/` all inherit from `$:/core/treenodes/node.js`
|
|
* Macros defined in `$:/core/macros/` all inherit from `$:/core/treenodes/macro.js`
|
|
|
|
`tiddlywiki.plugin` files
|