rojo/DESIGN.md

Rojo Design - Protocol Version 1

This is a super rough draft that I'm trying to use to lay out some of my thoughts.

API

POST /read

Accepts a Vec<Route> of items to read.

Returns Vec<Option<RbxInstance>>, in the same order as the request.

POST /write

Accepts a Vec<{ Route, RbxInstance }> of items to write.

I imagine that the Name attribute of the top-level RbxInstance would be ignored in favor of the route name?

CLI

The rojo serve command uses three major components:

• A Virtual Filesystem (VFS), which exposes the filesystem as VfsItem objects
• A VFS watcher, which tracks changes to the filesystem and logs them
• An HTTP API, which exposes an interface to the Roblox Studio plugin

Transform Plugins

Transform plugins (or filter plugins?) can interject in three places:

• Transform a VfsItem that's being read into an RbxInstance in the VFS
• Transform an Rbxitem that's being written into a VfsItem in the VFS
• Transform a file change into paths that need to be updated in the VFS watcher

The plan is to have several built-in plugins that can be rearranged/configured in project settings:

• Base plugin
  • Transforms all unhandled files to/from StringValue objects
• Script plugin
  • Transforms *.lua files to their appropriate file types
• JSON/rbxmx/rbxlx model plugin
• External binary plugin
  • User passes a binary name (like moonc) that modifies file contents

Roblox Studio Plugin

With the protocol version 1 change, the Roblox Studio plugin got a lot simpler. Notably, the plugin doesn't need to be aware of anything about the filesystem's semantics, which is super handy.