andrewstart / state-machine

Experiments with strongly typed state machine code that should be compatible with making a visual editing tool.

Goals

• Strongly typed code, including (as much as possible) transitions between states
• Usable in environments where you have multiple sessions running through the state machine simultaneously
• Useable in environments where you want to be able to pause a session, and restart it from serialized data
• Can be built with simple enough code that some sort of visual editing tool can be built to produce state machine code (with externally defined states)

Transition handling:

• All transitions are by name, with names beginning with ~ being considered an 'error' transition.
• A transition named by an empty string accepts all non-error transition names from the source state.
• Error transitions must be handled, or the state machine will reject immediately.
• Error transitions use a loose comparison method, so that ~Error will catch both ~Error.Foo and ~Error.Bar. ~ will catch all errors.

To do:

• Tests:
  • Multiple sessions at once
• Documentation
  • Example(s)
• Creation of additional basic states - something to wait for multiple parallel states to complete, for loop type thing?
• Figure out good way of "pausing" and restarting session
• Do decorators (particularly local ones) run at the end of a state if the state was interrupted?

Decorator Ideas:

• Global decorators - debug via history trace; debug via active logging; callback for unit testing