[Chirb] Question...

[L. Franklin]

Nate,

When you leave the comfortable confines of rails, you discover that ruby has
a wild-wild west side to it.  The only real convention that you see in Ruby
is that any code that you need to require/include in other code lives in a
/lib subdirectory on your project.  You will need to put in the appropriate
requires/includes to make sure your code pulls in your metaprogramming.  You
could store your metaprogramming and other includable routines elsewhere as
well; you just have to provide your requires an appropriate path to find
them.  Another possibility is to deploy your metaprogramming as a gem which
will slightly simplify the task of your code finding it.

Another alternative that I have adopted on several non-rails projects is to
go ahead and use the core components of rails anyway, stripping out AR and
other un-needed pieces.  This is a little easier to do with other frameworks
like merb which are more flexible about their components.  The benefit of
this is that you can still utilize the portions of rails/merb that are
convenient and take advantage of the huge library of plug-ins and deployment
tools.  I have taken this approach with several ruby applications that were
deployed as Windows executables using WxRuby as the GUI.  In that case I
still had a sqllite database managed by AR, but I stripped out all of the
web components.

We can chat more about this off-list about the specifics if you have more
questions.

Thanks!

Lukass

-----Original Message-----
From: Nate Kirby [mailto:natebkirby at yahoo.com] 
Sent: Sunday, June 29, 2008 8:37 PM
To: Chirb discussion list
Subject: [Chirb] Question...

All,

I feel kind of like a ruby nubie saying this, but all of my work in ruby 
has been in rails.  I just got some work that does not require rails.  
When I work in rails, whenever metaprogramming is used to change the 
behavior of say String#length, it has gone in application.rb, so all 
those kinds of behavoir changes have been easy to locate.  However, now, 
when working without rails, these kinds of things go... well I assume 
there must be a ruby convention for this.  I have found 
http://rubygarden.org/ruby/page/show/RubyStyleGuide and 
http://blog.jayfields.com/2007/01/class-reopening-hints.html but am 
unsure that the real ruby convention for changing a previously defined 
classes' behavior is clear.

Does anyone out there know the right answer?  Where do class 
redefinitions go according to ruby conventions?

TIA,
Nate


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