I have generally steered away from building open-source libraries mainly for selfish reasons (I didn't want to spend the time maintaining them) but I decided that the current work I was doing would benefit from input and improvement from others and so I decided to release two things as libraries and im really happy with how things went.



Both libraries are for MobX State Tree (MST) [which I have been using for quite some time](/posts/markd-2-total-re-write-using-react-mobx-state-tree-and-parse-server/) now. Its a fantastic library for managing your state in a clear and concise way tho there are some gotchas with parts of it. These libraries try to help with some of those gotchas and thus increase reliability when using MST.

# MST Flow Pipe

https://github.com/mikecann/mst-flow-pipe

This is a helper library for writing type-safe async code in MobX State Tree.

I wont go into all the details of how this one works, you can click the link above to read the readme. Briefly tho I felt that MST's async story was a little lacking when combined with Typescript so set out to improve it with this library.

I first talked about it on [this issue](https://github.com/mobxjs/mobx-state-tree/issues/1516) which prompted me to release the lib.

My first version had some corner cases that didn't work quite right but thankfully [@lorefnon](https://github.com/lorefnon) picked up from where I left off and submitted [a PR](https://github.com/mikecann/mst-flow-pipe/pull/1) which greatly improved the library. Now it works fantastically, is infinitely expandable and handles errors in an elegant way.

Im really happy with the state of the library and I think the concepts could be borrowed and used in other libraries that use JS-generators instead of JS-promises such as [redux-saga](https://redux-saga.js.org/).

# MST Log

![](./mst-log-screenshot01.png)

A console logging middleware for MobX State Tree

This one came about after some work with Redux and [redux-logger](https://github.com/LogRocket/redux-logger) which beautifully shows actions and state changes as groups in the console window. I thought this was really cool and couldn't find anything comparable in the MobX State Tree world so [I posted on the Spectrum group](https://spectrum.chat/mobx-state-tree/general/a-good-logger~206ccd36-527b-4f09-b7f0-fcbef90b407d) about it to see if anyone else was interested in it.

MST has some conceptual differences from Redux so some of the choices I made around nesting and grouping async calls may not be 100% correct. Im hoping that others will point out issues and help contribute to make it better. So far tho I am using it on our [BattleTabs](http://battletabs.com/) project to great effect.

This is my first post of what I suspect will be many on the subject of SWFt.

What is SWFt I hear you cry? Well in a nut shell SWFt is an Entity-Component based game framework powered by Dependency Injection. Still confused? Well basically its a really nice neat method for making flash games. Still interested? Read on!



First the history, if you arent interested in this then just skip on down to "What exactly is it?"

**History**

It started off as an idea I had while playing around with some RobotLegs code. For those not in the know, [RobotLegs ](https://www.robotlegs.org/) (RL) is an awsome Inversion of Control (IoC) or Dependency Injection (DI) MVCS framework for making Rich Internet Applications (I wrote a post on it [here](/posts/on-the-bleeding-edge/)). IoC and DI were new concepts to me and I was fascinated and excited by the power that they had especially when couppled with something like [AS3 Signals](https://github.com/robertpenner/as3-signals).

At the time of this discovery I was working on a game that used [Push Button Engine](https://pushbuttonengine.com/) (PBE) and [Mate ](https://mate.asfusion.com/)as the basis for development. Feeling dissatisfied with PBE and Mate I wondered if there was a way I could take all the cool things I was playing around with RobotLegs and apply them to some of the cool aspects of PBE.

The first thing I did was to check to see if anyone else has had the idea of using DI in a component based game engine. It looked like it hasnt been done in AS3 but it looks like it has already been thought about and documented in Java. There has been a paper written about it here: [https://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1658866.1658872](https://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1658866.1658872), I managed to get my greasy mitts on it and enjoyed the read however I think there was definitely room for improvement in AS3.

The next thing was to seek advice on whether it could even be done in RL. I decided that I should go straight to the source and I emailed one of the contributors to the RL project, Stray. It turns out stray is a very nice lady who is also from the north of the UK. She had some good words of advice but she recommendation that I repost my question to the RL mailing list where the other contributors to the project tend to lurk.

So I wrote up my query[ and posted it](https://groups.google.com/group/robotlegs/browse_thread/thread/f7e325c5caf14d93). I added in some diagrams of how I thought it may look:

[![](/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Relationships-1-300x259.png "Relationships 1")](/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Relationships-1.png)[![](/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Example-1-300x161.png "Example 1")](/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Example-1.png)

To cut a long story short, after [several months](https://groups.google.com/group/robotlegs/browse_thread/thread/4833ba99cd12b25a) of [posts](https://groups.google.com/group/robotlegs/browse_thread/thread/4d3eb6d8f8dd64bc#) back and forth with many excellent suggestions and contributions I felt it was time that the project migrated to its own home as not spam up the RL list too much. As such [SWft - Game Framework](https://groups.google.com/group/swft-framework) mailing list was born! Its still very new and as such there arent many posts yet but I hope for that to grow as the project progresses.

We also have a website: [https://www.swft.co.uk](https://www.swft.co.uk) but its meerly a holding page for now.

**What exactly is it?**

Okay so I promised I would talk about what SWFt actually is. Well without going into too much detail (more posts will follow that will flesh out examples etc) SWFt lets you make AS3 Flash games in a modular component based fashion like you do with [Push Button Engine](https://pushbuttonengine.com/) but it lets you keep the strict-type, compile-time checked game structure like you may find in [Flixel ](https://flixel.org/)or [Flash Punk](https://flashpunk.net/).

Its still very alpha and has alot more work left to do on it but you can follow progress on our GitHub page here: [https://github.com/mikecann/Swft](https://github.com/mikecann/Swft) and some examples can also be found here: [https://github.com/mikecann/Swift-Examples](https://github.com/mikecann/Swift-Examples) (the red-blue circle experiment is currently broken)

As I say, its still very early days, but I have been wanting to blog about it for a while as its a very exciting project im currently working on :)

**Contributions**

If you are interested in contributing code or thoughts or anything then shoot a message on the mailing list: [https://groups.google.com/group/swft-framework](https://groups.google.com/group/swft-framework)

Expect more posts in the coming weeks!

Well for the last few evenings I have been working on this little proof of concept. One of my work colleague Ade ([@6t8](https://twitter.com/6t8)) came up with the idea "someone should make a game that you can play over twitter". Well after abit of excitement and talk I decided to have a go at coding this idea. Once I had started I realised that it could be possible to do alot more with this, so I decided to make the project a little more generic and turn it into a pluggable bot for automating twitter.



After a few evenings work however I decided that this project was going to take up a bit too much of my time, especially when I had so much other work to do. So I have decided to release what I have done and let other take it and develop it if they wish.

You login using a twitter account:

![1](/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/1.gif "1")

Once logged in you are presented with the main interface, plugins are loaded automatically from the directory and displayed as tabs. The reason for doing them as plugins is to allow users to pick and choose what functionality they want their twittbot to have. Also it allows for easy upgrading to newer plugin versions.

![2](/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/2.gif "2")

Hangman was the primary idea for this project and is implemented as a simple plugin that consists of 3 simple commands:

![3](/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/3.gif "3")

I have built a simple polling timer for checking new messages from Twitter:

![4](/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/4.gif "4")

The interface uses docking panels provided by the[ .NET DockPanel Suite](https://sourceforge.net/projects/dockpanelsuite/). Docking is demonstrated below with the log window:

![5](/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/5.gif "5")

The next shot shows me sending a direct message to the "[twittgames](https://www.twitter.com/twittgames)" account from my "[mikeysee](https://www.twitter.com/mikeysee)" account:

![6](/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/6.gif "6")

After refreshing, the Hangman plugin then shows the active game states:

![7](/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/7.gif "7")

Then you play the game by making guesses:

![8](/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/8.gif "8")A

And the plugin responds to your guesses:

![9](/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/9.gif "9")

It is far from complete but as a proof of concept I think it demonstrates the idea. There are many things that could be improved and/or worked upon, such as:

- Implement async calls rather than halting the thread when making a call
- Completing the Auto-follow plugin
- Implementing a database to log previously handled messages
- Enable back-messaging so you can search for previous messages and handle them
- Implement an interface for loading/unloading plugins
  For the technology side of things, its was developed in C# .NET 3.5 using the excellent [TweetSharp ](https://code.google.com/p/tweetsharp/)library for interfacing with Twitter. Docking panel functionality is provided by [DockPanel Suite](https://sourceforge.net/projects/dockpanelsuite/).

You can grab the binary for this here: [TwitterBot.zip](Files/TwitterBot.zip)

Source code is available on request. Email: mike.cann@gmail.com

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