State Transitions in Mojo

Next up will be a "midterm" post, but I just want to post this first, because... well... because it was more fun on a Friday night to do this analysis. (Yes, I could also have gone out. But you know, I did that last night! Yes, really!) As you'll see, fun is obviously in the eye of the beholder, because this is unlikely to interest anyone but a very small handful of Mojo developers.

So a lot of the classes in Mojo are stateful. They inherit from the Stateful class. However, that class is pretty barebones, and "states" are fundamentally just a string property on an object. So there's no single place you can go to see the list of allowable states, and no documentation (let alone verification) of allowed state transitions. The first step in addressing this is to collect some data on the various stateful subclasses and see how they actually behave. So I instrumented the Stateful class and had it print out all state transitions. I then ran the Mojo test suite (including some non-default tests), which generated a little over 2100 state transitions. I fed these results to Graph::Easy (which I discovered thanks to a blog post on MojoX::Routes::AsGraph by Marcus Ramberg) in order to generate state diagrams. We may therefore consider this post as a kind of "documenting-on-the-run"...

Here are the results, in increasing order of complexity.

First up, Mojo::Stateful:


Simple enough. The number on the arrow indicates the number of times that particular state transition occurred during the testing. (That gives an indication of how much "exercise" the current test suite gives each state transition.) Next comes Mojo::Headers:

Mojo::Message::Response is still pretty simple:

And Mojo::Message::Request is barely more complicated:

At the same level of complexity, Mojo::Filter::Chunked:

One more step up are Mojo::Content:


and Mojo::Content::Multipart:

Finally, here comes the punchline: the two classes I've been working most heavily on/with (click for full size).

Mojo::Transaction:


And Mojo::Pipeline:

There you go! Simple as pie, right?