cyclonejs

Cyclone is an attempt to implement an adaptation of the HTML5 Structured Cloning Algorithm.

It is meant to be:

• Synchronous
• Agnostic to the JS environment (doesn't rely on postMessage(), replaceState(), etc), and therefore agnostic to types such as File, Blob, etc (which also allows it to be synchronous in the first place).
• Serve the majority of use cases out of the box, but also provide a mechanism to be extensible (coming soon).
• Able to copy functions (including function objects) by reference. This is the only property that's copied by reference. See above about serving the majority of use cases.
• Able to copy DOM objects via cloneNode

It can handle objects containing:

• Primitives
• null
• undefined
• Number objects
• String objects
• Boolean objects
• Date objects
• RegExp objects
• Array objects
• Object (or "plain") objects
• In most cases, Objects instantiated with the use of a custom constructor (e.g. function Foo() { this.bar = 'baz' }; var cloneable = new Foo();)
• Cyclic references to itself, including nested cyclic references
• Cyclic references to objects within itself, including nested cyclic references to those objects
• DOM Objects

Usage

This module exposes a single object, CY, into the global scope when used within browsers. A client can then use this module's clone method to perform clone operations.

  var o = {
    date: new Date(),
    number: Math.random()
  };
  o.self = o;
  o.tricky = { self: o };

  var c = CY.clone(o);

  c === o; // false
  c.date === o.date; // false

  +(c.date) === +(o.date); // true
  c.number === o.number;  // true
  c.self === c;  // true
  c.tricky.self === c;  // true

Note that cycloneJS also supports AMD loading as well as use within nodeJS, so with node you could do something like

var CY = require('cyclonejs');
// Do some CY.clone()-ing

Contributing/Testing

First install the module

$ git clone https://github.com/traviskaufman/cycloneJS.git
$ cd /path/to/cycloneJS
$ npm install .

Then just run npm test within the module's directory whenever you want to test. This will run jshint on all javascript files as well as run tests against cyclone.

Coming Soon

• Ability to define your own protocols for copying unsupported and/or custom objects.
• Features other people contribute.