Dispatcher

The Dispatcher is the beating heart of Ares. Using an EventMachine reactor library, it ensures that commands and events are queued up and handled in an orderly fashion.

Dispatches

The Dispatcher handles three main types of dispatches:

• Commands - in response to player input from a MU Client.
• Events - in response to something happening in the game, like a player being created.
• Web Requests - in response to a player doing something on the Web Portal.

Whenever it gets one of these dispatches, it goes through all the plugins to see if anybody wants to handle it. Commands and Web Requests may only be handled by a single plugin. Events may be handled by any plugin.

A plugin specifies what dispatches it handles through pre-defined methods that the Dispatcher knows to call: get_cmd_handler, get_event_handler and get_web_request_handler. Each of these methods may either return a handler class (like TinkerCmd) or nil if the plugin doesn’t care about the dispatch.

Spawns

Although the main reactor is single-threaded (ensuring all commands are handled in order), it is possible to spawn a background task to handle long-running tasks without blocking the main command queue. This is particularly important for calls to external websites that may take some time.

For example:

    Global.dispatcher.spawn("Performing backup.", client) do
        ... perform backup code ...
    end

Timers

A timer delays code until some time has elapsed. The code will be processed in queue order - it’s not spawned into a background task - it will just be delayed. For example, the following code waits 2 seconds and then does an emit:

    Global.dispatcher.queue_timer(2, "Tell guest their name", client) do
      client.emit_success t('login.guest_name', :name => guest.name)
    end

Queue

The Dispatcher provides there ways for code to add things to the queue:

• queue_command - Adds a command to be processed. See Command Handling.
• queue_event - Adds an event to be processed. See Event Handling.
• queue_action - Adds some arbitrary code to be processed. This isn’t commonly used.
• queue_timer - Queues a timer, as explained above.