Sweetloader

A 'sweet' autoloader designed to autoload your modules and classes more easily, by taking advantage of a standard directory structure approach for the placement of your classes and modules. You can also configure Sweetloader to override the defaults in various ways... and even have it use require instead of autoload :)

Install

Insert in your Gemfile:

gem 'sweetloader'

Run bundler to install

$bundle$

Usage

Simply use the autoload_modules macro in your Module and Class definitions.

CanTango
  autoload_module :Configuration, :Factory, :Permit
end

Each of these modules are then expected to be in @catango/configuration.rb@ and similar relative to a load path.

SweetLoader Configuration

The following global config vars are available in SweetLoader:

root
namespaces
mode

Note: AutoLoader is available as a deprecated alias for SweetLoader (versions < 1.5)

Root

Set a specific root which the dir will be calculated relative to, using root.

SweetLoader.root = 'fixtures'

Now the constant ::CanTango will be resolved as 'fixtures/can_tango'

Namespaces

Normally the constant CanTango will be translated to the dir 'can_tango', here we override this so it will instead be translated to 'cantango'.

SweetLoader.namespaces= {:CanTango => 'cantango', :Permithelper => 'permit_helper'}

Modes

SweetLoader supports the following modes: :autoload, :require

The mode :require is used to execute require statements directly. The :autoload mode is used to do autoloading. Note that autoloading is not stable in multi-threaded environments and will likely be deprecated in later version of Ruby. However autoloading does perform lazy loading and can be advantageous when you want to speed up initial load time and don't run in a multi-threaded environment.

autoload_modules Configuration

You can also specify the SweetLoader options directly as an option hash on the #autoload_modules call:

  sweetload :Configuration, :mode => :require
  sweetload :Configuration, :Factory, :root => 'helpers'
  sweetload :Configuration, :Factory, :Permit, :ns => {:CanTango => 'cantango'} # or use :namespaces

Note: #autoload_modules is deprecated in place of #sweetload

Mutate path option

This option is only available for autoload_modules. It can be used to execute more general substitution logic on the generated file path:

  sweetload :Configuration, :Factory, :Permit, :mutate_path => Proc.new {|path| path.sub(/(ies)/, 'y') }

Scopes

A Scope allows options to be specified that are effective on all autoload_modules statements within the scope.

module AutoloadModules
  module Configuration
    # the scope options only have effect for autoload_modules statements within it!
    sweet_scope
                :ns => { :AutoloadModules => 'fixtures/autoload_modulez'},
                :mutate_path => Proc.new {|path| path.sub(/(ies)/, 'y') } do
      sweetload :Admin
    end

    sweetload :Editor
  end
end

Note: #autoload_scope is deprecated in place of #sweet_scope

ClassExt

Sweetloader also encludes a convenient extension called ClassExt, which can be used to find a Module or Class based on a name.

module First
    module Blip
        def self.blip
        end
    end
end

module Second
    include_and_extend ClassExt
  include_and_extend First
end

Second.new.try_module('Blip').blip
Second.try_module('Blip').blip
Second.try_class('Blip') == nil # => ClassNotFoundError

Second.find_first_class(:Blop, :blip_blop, 'Blip') # => ClassNotFoundError
Second.find_first_module('Blop', :blip) # => Blip:Class

Contributing to sweetloader

Check out the latest master to make sure the feature hasn't been implemented or the bug hasn't been fixed yet
Check out the issue tracker to make sure someone already hasn't requested it and/or contributed it
Fork the project
Start a feature/bugfix branch
Commit and push until you are happy with your contribution
Make sure to add tests for it. This is important so I don't break it in a future version unintentionally.
Please try not to mess with the Rakefile, version, or history. If you want to have your own version, or is otherwise necessary, that is fine, but please isolate to its own commit so I can cherry-pick around it.