Application structure overview

The Gaffa instance

Gaffa applications start with an instance of gaffa.

Gaffa can be obtained from NPM:

npm install gaffa

Then, in a javascript file, require gaffa, and create an instance:

var Gaffa = require('gaffa'),
    gaffa = new Gaffa();

ViewItems

Gaffa applications are built from many small building blocks called viewItems.

viewItems fall into three categories:

• Views
  • things you can see.
• Actions
  • units of functionality that are triggered by either views or behaviours
• Behaviours
  • anything that doesn't fit the above

Gaffa does not ship with any viewItems, instead, install them from npm, or in the unlikely case you need to, create your own.

eg:

var Textbox = require('gaffa-textbox');

Once you have obtained a viewItem constructor, you will want to register it with gaffa.

gaffa.registerConstructor(Textbox);

to create a view, simply new one up:

var myTextbox = new Textbox();

and to add it to the UI:

gaffa.views.add(myTextbox);

The above should be just enough code to put an input on your page.