Mollusca Code

Danlucraft pointed something out the other day: Why would Importer require that you use a hash? And of course he was right. So after a little review: Importer, second iteration:

module Importer

  module ClassMethods
    def importer(package, classes)
        classes.each do |item|
          path = package + "." + item
          import path
        end
    end
  end

  def self.included(receiver)
    receiver.extend ClassMethods
  end

end

This will remove the pesky hash notation:

require 'importer'

class Banzaiii
  include Importer
  importer 'org.eclipse.swt.widgets', \
      %w{Display, Shell, Button, Canvas}
  importer 'org.eclipse.swt', ['SWT']

  def build
    puts SWT::BOLD | SWT::ITALIC 
  end
end

Maybe this will evolve into something that enables you to do the follwing:

class Widgets
  include Importer
  importer 'org.eclipse.swt.widgets.*'
end

# and thus
canvas = Widgets::Canvas.new

Which is exactly what is currently missing from jruby…

Import Puts Noise In My Class

Today I stumbled accross something like this:

class SwtBuilder

  import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display
  import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Shell
  import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Button
  import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Canvas
  import org.eclipse.swt.SWT

  import ch.mollusca.foo.Bar
  import ch.mollusca.foo.Jiffy

  def build
    puts SWT::BOLD | SWT::ITALIC
  end

end

SwtBuilder.new.build

Alas, jRuby doesn’t support

import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.*

there is plenty of noise throughout this class definition. It’s a lot of vertical clutter and I don’t like it. This will even get worse for any class that ties together a few java classes.

Enter Importer

I tried to figure out a way to clean this up. Maybe I’ve hit the spot, but I think it’s not quite there yet. Anyway:

module Importer

  module ClassMethods
    def importer(hash)
      unless hash[:path] && hash[:items]
        puts "need to specify path and items!" 
      else
        hash[:items].each do |item|
          path = hash[:path] + "." + item
          import path
        end
      end
    end
  end

  def self.included(receiver)
    receiver.extend ClassMethods
  end

end

This allows me to write:

class SwtBuilder

  include Importer
  importer :path => 'org.eclipse.swt.widgets', \
    :items => ['Display', 'Shell', 'Button', 'Canvas']
  importer :path => 'org.eclipse.swt', :items => ['SWT']

  def build
    puts SWT::BOLD | SWT::ITALIC
  end

end

SwtBuilder.new.build

It’s formatted in two lines for layout reasons, but in principle can nicely be written on one line. Any comments on the idea?

I just had to do this. Sorry to all those who already liked the old blog :D

Something had to be done about the PHP bloat that was flying around before this. So I switched to this nice and clean ruby based blogging engine.

Thanks to Passenger (mod_rails) that was relatively easy to achieve. Alas, the server is running Debian, there where some problems during the initial setup of the ruby and rails environment. Why the hell does Debian ship a 1.5 years old package in the stable branch? I mean come on 1.8.5?? WTF!

Anyway. Here we go now. Shiny new blog, leaner and meaner software, where I can actually read the code and edit it and where I can also add new features. We’ll see about that though.

I will soon move the old articles over here. Actually as soon as I have syntax highlighting like pastie.org :D

Ah, and yeah, mephisto is in fact not dead. Go see the mephisto git repo.