CAF.js (Cloud Assistant Framework)

Co-design permanent, active, stateful, reliable cloud proxies with your web app and IoT devices.

See http://www.cafjs.com

CAF

This repository is managed as a monorepo using Yarn workspaces. It contains a consistent snapshot of all the other CAF sub-projects, included as git submodules.

Getting Started

Install node 8.X.X and yarn >=1.3.2. Our development is done with Linux.

Clone this repository (git clone https://github.com/cafjs/caf.git) and update submodules:

  cd caf; git submodule update --init

Install all the dependencies (it takes about 30s in my laptop):

yarn run installAll

add to your path the cafjs tools:

export PATH=<your_install_directory>/caf/bin:$PATH

and now let's build and run locally a simple app:

cd apps/caf_helloworld; cafjs build; cafjs run helloworld

The first time we call cafjs run it takes a few minutes, because it downloads the core Docker images. Ignore timeout exceptions during that time, it retries.

The app server URL is http://root-launcher.vcap.me (DNS always resolves *.vcap.me to 127.0.0.1, i.e., the local loop). With your browser, login with user foo and password pleasechange, and then click the + icon to add a helloworld CA. Fill the form as follows:

• Application publisher: root
• Application name: helloworld
• CA name: anything containing ASCII characters and numbers.

and a counter example should appear. Use the + again to create other CAs, and then select the menu on the top right to switch between them.

To stop it, a single Control-C will initiate a gentle container shutdown but, for the impatient, a second Control-C will brute force a clean-up.

In both cases we should be able to restart without losing the CA's state. This state is checkpointed in a Redis container that mounts a host volume (log file in /tmp/redis/appendonly.aof, host port 6380). To start from scratch, delete the log file in the host.

Using the cafjs command we can also simulate devices, build container images to publish in our cloud service, i.e., https://root-launcher.cafjs.com, or reset after a hang. See external:caf_dcinabox (https://cafjs.github.io/api/caf_dcinabox) for details.

Write your app in a subdirectory of caf/playground, and yarn workspaces will also manage your app dependencies.