werelax / statemachine-js

A flexible finite state machine implementation in CoffeeScript

StateMachine-js

A finite state machine (FSM) implementation in CoffeeScript. I couldn't find a FSM in JS that fits my needs, so I wrote (what I think is) a quite awsome one.

State Machine aproaches

All the FSMs that I found are quite specific and limited. They fall in to big categories: the defined-by-transition ("Mealy") machines and the defined-by-state ("Moore") machines. But all very simplistic. Sometimes the behaviour is not defined well enough only in the states or only in the transitions.

I wanted an abstraction which lets me describe and build complex behaviours. And I wanted it to be asynchronous. With this implementation, you can describe the states, describe the (asyn) transitions, and even specify (async) filters to be ran before each transition or state.

Syntax

I've found that a FSM usually needs three stages of definition: creation, description and context.

Creating a new machine es quite simple:

sm = new W.StateMachine(events: [
  {name: 'my_event', from: 'some_state', to: 'target_state'}
])