In order to get the TiddlyWiki wikifier to work standalone, a great deal
of the TiddlyWiki code is required. Have a look at TWREMOTES
in the
Makefile
and the comments in TwikifierBase.js
. The general overview
comment is that TiddlyWiki is non-functional: meaning its modules and methods
are tightly coupled with others, have many side effects and make use of
data from globals rather than passed in parameters. This means that independent
code reuse is nigh on impossible.
That this is true is neither surprising, nor damning: TiddlyWiki was originally built as a single file application. However since there is code in there that could be useful if extracted and abstracted, hopefully this work can point out some of the problems.
I tried to write down a simple dependency tree that explains how each chunk of javascript requires another, but delineating the reasons got to be too much so instead: What follows has less explanation than it could.
twikifier
functionality currently lives in twikify
and TwikifierBase.js
.
twikify
requires global wikify()
in Wikifier.js
.
Wikifier.js
requires the global formatter
, a Formatter
from FormatterHelpers.js
.
FormatterHelpers.js
requires the global config
, from Config.js
.
A Formatter
needs formatters, which are in config
and defined in Formatter.js
.
Formatter.js
requires FormatterHelper.js
, creating a cycle.
Wikifier.js
requires global createTiddlyText()
, from Utilities.js
.
Wikifier.js
requires global createTiddlyElement()
, from Utilities.js
.
Formatter.js
, to format links, requires global createTiddlyLink()
from Utilities.js
.
Utilities.js
requires the pushUnique
modification to the Array
prototype. This is found in BasicTypes.js
.
Formatter.js
, FormatterHelpers.js
, Utilities.js
all make use of a store
global. A store, is a TiddlyWiki
class, from TiddlyWiki.js
.
TiddlyWiki.js
calls instanceof Tiddler
(4 times) and new Tiddler
(twice), thus requiring Tiddler.js
.
Utilities.js
has getTiddlyLinkInfo
, which requires Lingo.js
for messages.
(Lingo.js
requires Config.js
and Utilities.js
(for merge()).)
Presenting messages requires adding format()
to the String
prototype, thus requiring Strings.js
.
This gets us to a working formatter, but not macros.
Adding Macros.js
adds (limited, not yet tested) support for macros. Macros.js
requires Config.js
.
For macros to run, we need invokeMacro
, which is from main.js. Rather
than including main.js (which has active code at the global level) I
made a copy of invokeMacro
. It is not clear why the function definition
code is in main.
The difficulty here is not so much that there are a bunch of interdependencies, but rather that the interdependencies are in the global scope and because the files are simply building blocks for a single file, there are no clues like import statements, namespaces, etc.