8. Pods

Overview

Pods are the top of Fantom's namespace as well as the unit of deployment. A pod's name is globally unique and is used to organize the top level of Fantom's namespace. In this respect pods serve the purpose of both a Java package and a JAR file (or .NET namespace and DLL).

Pod Meta

Pods do not use Facets for metadata like types and slots. Rather pod metadata is managed as name/value pairs. Key metadata about your pod is defined in the build script:

class Build : build::BuildPod
{
  new make()
  {
    podName = "myPod"
    summary = "Summary description of my pod"
    depends = ["sys 1.0", "web 1.0"]
    meta    = ["acme.sku": "0xdeadbeef"]
    srcDirs = [`fan/`]
    resDirs = [`locale/`]
  }
}

During the build process fields like podName and depends are used by the compiler to generate the pod's metadata. You can define your own additional name/value pairs with BuildPod.meta. Plus the compiler will add its own metadata regarding when and where the pod was built.

Metadata is stored "/meta.props" in the pod zip file. The Pod.meta method is used to access a pod's metadata at runtime.

The following are the standardized user defined keys:

The following are the standardized keys automatically defined by compiler: