Lifecycle

Understanding the lifecycle of a request in Cherrycake will give you valuable insight on how it works.

We'll first go through a simplified version of the lifecycle of a request, assuming we're building a website application and our client is a web browser.

When a Cherrycake application receives a request, it first loads some initial modules like Output, Errors and Actions. These are the modules that Cherrycake needs to determine what to do next:

Cherrycake now asks the Actions module to attend the received request:

To do so, Actions checks the requested route to see which modules have mapped an action. If it founds a mapped action that matches the current request, loads and runs the module who mapped it.

Let's say the browser requested the home of our website by requesting the / route, and that this route has been mapped by a module we called Home. Cherrycake loads this module and runs it:

Home is an app module (as opposed to a core module), and is in charge of showing the home page of the website. To do so, Home uses the Patterns core module to load an HTML file from disk and then send it to the browser. Since the Patterns module has not been loaded yet, Cherrycake loads it automatically:

Since all output is handled by the Output core module, Patterns reads the requested HTML file and uses Output to send back the response to the Browser, and the request lifecycle concludes.

Now let's take a deeper look at how all this happens with some code, in the Deep lifecycle section.