Mars Rover, Locating package — Loïc Faugeron

Mars Rover, Locating package 14/09/2016

In this series we're building the software of a Mars Rover, according to the following specifications. It allows us to practice the followings:

Monolithic Repositories (MonoRepo)
Command / Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS)
Event Sourcing (ES)
Test Driven Development (TDD)

We've already developed the first use case about landing the rover on mars, and the second one about driving it. We're now going to start developing the last one, requesting its location:

Mars rover will be requested to give its current location (x and y coordinates and the orientation).

In this article we're going to create a new package for the location logic.

Why a new package?

Until now we've been putting our Landing and Driving code in the navigation package. It's a "write" type of logic: an event occurs and we log it in the Event Store.

On the other hand, requesting the location of the rover is a "read" type of logic, since we've decided to follow the CQRS principle we're going to separate them and put it in its own package.

The benefit of this approach can become more apparent if we decide to create web APIs to control our Mars Rover and replicate the data accross multiple servers: we could put the "write" endpoints on a single "Publishing" server, and then put the "read" endpoints on many "Subsriber" servers.

The "Subscriber" servers only need to synchronize their data with the "Publisher" server, allowing us to scale.

Creating the `location` package

We can start by creating the directory:

git checkout -b 5-location
mkdir -p packages/location
cd packages/location

Composer needs us to set up the package by creating a composer.json file:

{
    "name": "mars-rover/location",
    "license": "MIT",
    "type": "library",
    "description": "Mars Rover - Location",
    "autoload": {
        "psr-4": { "MarsRover\\Location\\": "src/MarsRover/Location" }
    },
    "require": {
        "php": "^7.0"
    },
    "require-dev": {
        "memio/spec-gen": "^0.6"
    }
}

We've decided to use phpspec as a test framework, and to get the most of it we'd like to use its SpecGen extension. To do so we need to create the phpspec.yml.dist file:

extensions:
    Memio\SpecGen\MemioSpecGenExtension: ~

Note: For more information about phpspec see this article.

Finally, we can configure this package's git by creating a .gitignore file:

# Configuration
/phpspec.yml

# Third Party libraries
/vendor/
/composer.lock

With this we've finished creating our package. We can run Composer:

composer install --optimize-autoloader

That should be enough for a first commit:

git add -A
git commit -m '5: Created Location package'

Adding `location` to the project

Let's go back to the project's root:

cd ../../

All we need to do is to add a new line in the require section of our composer.json file:

{
    "name": "mars-rover/mars-rover",
    "license": "MIT",
    "type": "project",
    "description": "Mars Rover",
    "repositories": [
        {
            "type": "path",
            "url": "./packages/*"
        }
    ],
    "require": {
        "mars-rover/event-sourcing": "*@dev",
        "mars-rover/location": "*@dev",
        "mars-rover/navigation": "*@dev",
        "php": "^7.0"
    },
    "require-dev": {
        "phpspec/phpspec": "^3.0"
    }
}

Actually, we also need to add a new section in phpspec.yml.dist:

suites:
    event-sourcing:
        namespace: 'MarsRover\EventSourcing'
        src_path: packages/event-sourcing/src
        spec_path: packages/event-sourcing

    location:
        namespace: 'MarsRover\Location'
        src_path: packages/location/src
        spec_path: packages/location

    navigation:
        namespace: 'MarsRover\Navigation'
        src_path: packages/navigation/src
        spec_path: packages/navigation

And that's it! We are now able to run Composer and then phpspec:

composer update --optimize-autoloader
vendor/bin/phpspec run

That should be enough for a second commit:

git add -A
git commit -m '5: Added location package to main project'

Conclusion

In order to keep the "write" logic in the navigation package separated from the "read" logic, we've created a new location package.

What's next

In the next article, we'll start creating the LocateDriverHandler class.

Why a new package?

Creating the location package

Adding location to the project

Conclusion

What's next

Creating the `location` package

Adding `location` to the project