Clingfilm

A nice place for your Ruby actors to live

Clingfilm is light system for concurrency on top of the wonderful Celluloid project. Its goal is to be a quick & simple way to make use of the actor pattern in Ruby.

Installation

• Install the gem or add gem "clingfilm" to your Gemfile

Usage

Clingfilm is made up of 3 main components: MessageWrappers, Pulses and Marshallers.

Message Wrappers

These wrap any Ruby object which has an "update" method and turns it into an actor. They listen on one or more queues for :update messages, run the update method and announce on the outgoing queues when they are done.

Pulses

These are very basic actors which 'pulse' update messages on a given interval. Useful (if slightly inaccurate) clocks for getting things going!

Marshallers

These deal with the construction and wiring up of the other elements. They also recreate any actors which explode due to exceptions.

Logging

Clingfilm publishes log messages about the sending and receiving of messages between actors at the debug level. The logging is done using Celluloids logging mechanism, which is null unless set; for example, in Rails:

Celluloid.logger = Rails.logger

More details can be read in the Celluloid logging docs.

ToDo

1. Allow sending data in messages instead of relying on store/retreive
2. Add an example implementation to the documentation
3. Add an more in-depth example implementation to the documentation