Introducing Autocode 0.9.9

by Dan Yoder on May 18, 2008

Autocode is basically a class loader for Ruby that acts as a mixin. It will also load modules and add initialization hooks. This provides true code reloading, that can actually be used to hot-swap code for production apps. Since it actually removes constants from memory at runtime, there is no danger of artifacts remaining from prior loads.

Example

The following code will attempt to load any referenced constant in the scope of the Views module from the “view” class. Thus, Views::Show will attempt to load “views/show.rb”.

module Views
  include AutoCode
  auto_load true, :directories => [ 'views' ]
end

Here’s another more sophisticated example that will first attempt to load a model class from the ‘models’ directory and, failing that will use a “default” exemplar to create a class.

module Blog
  module Models
    class Default
      # ...
    end
    auto_create_class true, Blog::Models::Default
    auto_load_class true, :directories => ['models']
  end
end

That’s it. Not only can you not worry about using require to load everything, you can actually call Blog::Models.reload to unload all the dynamically loaded code (thereby forcing it to be reloaded).

Go to the main project page.