Welcome to the Fae ecosystem. Fae might be a bit different than what most people are used to in other libraries and frameworks, but the hope is to provide a solid foundation to build you applications and frameworks upon.
At its core Fae is a collection of components, systems, and entities that empower users to build amazing 2D applications. Fae isn't just a library, or a framework, but instead an ecosystem of small modules that together can do almost anything.
While different, if you give Fae's way of doing things a try I promise you will come to appreciate the elegance of the system.
The Mission Statement of Fae is:
Fae sets out to create a powerful ecosystem of Modular, Composable, and Reusable packages that work together to power amazing 2D applications.
Like it says in the Mission Statement, the basic philosophy of Fae is to build a collection Modular, Composable, Reusable parts. Each of these descriptors is considered a Core Value of the Fae ecosystem, and is explored in more detail below. When developing for Fae contributors and plugin authors should keep this section in mind.
Fae takes the concept of modularity very seriously. By modularizing as much as is reasonable in order to provide the choice to the users of what they want in their builds. A good guide is the Unix Philosophy which emphasizes building "simple, short, clear, modular, and extensible code that can be easily maintained and repurposed by developers other than its creators."
Most frameworks achieve something like this by allowing you to exclude or include parts of the library, which helps with file-size. Other ecosystems like Fae and jQuery UI take it a step further. Not only is file-size reduced but not a single CPU cycle is spent on the excluded feature. Not even to check if the feature is active. Everyone who uses Fae may have a slightly different build, and that is OK.
While modularity alone can be good, it can also introduce some challenges. One specific challenges that presents itself is that once you have a bunch of different small packages, how do you use them together in a meaningful way?
Fae approaches this problem using a similar pattern to the Entity Component System pattern, with a couple of minor differences. I wrote a detailed article about Fae's flavor of ECS on my blog, if you are interested. Fae's flavor of ECS defines the terms as follows:
Entitesare created from chains of inherited components.Componentsare "subclass factories," functions that return a class inheriting from the parameter.Systemsare classes that perform actions on entities and their components.
Those familiar with ECS will probably be wondering why in our flavor of ECS are components mixins instead of data containers independent of the entity. For full details about why you can read my blog article on the subject. The short version though is that people want to use an OOP interface when using libraries like this. So by implementing ECS with Entities as Assemblages only and Components as Mixins I feel that we get the best of both worlds. We get the ease of use of classes (for the end user) with the composability and modularization of ECS (for library developers).
If you have read the description of Fae's flavor of ECS and read the 2 Core Value sections
above, you may have an idea where this is going. Since we strive to build small plugins
that do one thing and do it well, it is pretty likely that code in that plugin is applicable
elsewhere. For example, components can be reused over and over (with their associated systems)
in new Entities as much as is imaginable. You don't have to extend the Sprite class to
have the SpriteRenderer render your texture. You just need the right components and system!