8. Pods

Overview

Pods are the top of Fantom's namespace as well as the unit of deployment. A pod's name is globally unique and is used to organize the top level of Fantom's namespace. In this respect pods serve the purpose of both a Java package and a JAR file (or .NET namespace and DLL).

Pod Meta

Pods do not use Facets for metadata like types and slots. Rather pod metadata is managed as name/value pairs. Key metadata about your pod is defined in the build script:

class Build : build::BuildPod
{
  new make()
  {
    podName = "myPod"
    summary = "Summary description of my pod"
    depends = ["sys 1.0", "web 1.0"]
    meta    = ["acme.sku": "0xdeadbeef"]
    srcDirs = [`fan/`]
    resDirs = [`locale/`]
  }
}

During the build process fields like podName and depends are used by the compiler to generate the pod's metadata. You can define your own additional name/value pairs with BuildPod.meta. Plus the compiler will add its own metadata regarding when and where the pod was built.

Metadata is stored "/meta.props" in the pod zip file. The Pod.meta method is used to access a pod's metadata at runtime.

The following are the standardized user defined keys:

  • org.name: name of the organization who developed the pod; the name should be a unique string name used consistently across all pods
  • org.uri: web site URL of the organization
  • proj.name: name of the project which groups one or pods; should be a unique string name used consistently across all pods
  • proj.uri: web site URL of the project
  • license.name: name of the license used by the project which should be "Commercial" or one of the long names defined by OSI
  • vcs.name: name of the version control system: "Mercurial", "Git", "Subversion"
  • vcs.uri: URI of the public version control repository

The following are the standardized keys automatically defined by compiler:

  • pod.name: name of the pod
  • pod.version: Version of the pod
  • pod.depends: list of semicolon separated Depend strings
  • pod.summary: overview decription for pod
  • pod.isScript: was the pod compiled in script mode
  • pod.docSrc: should documentation include source code, see BuildPod
  • pod.docApi: should pod be included in documentation, see BuildPod
  • pod.native.java: does pod use native Java code (true or false)
  • pod.native.dotnet: does pod use native .NET code (true or false)
  • pod.native.js: does pod use native JavaScript code (true or false)
  • fcode.version: binary format version of the fcode
  • build.ts: compile time in local timezone formatted as DateTime
  • build.platform: compile env platform formatted as Env.platform
  • build.host: compile env host name, see Env.host
  • build.user: compile env user name, see Env.user
  • build.compiler: compiler pod version