Temporal Object

This is an implementation of Martin Fowler's Temporal Object Pattern.

It uses abstract time (as implemented by the time_span gem). If you would rather use standard Earth time, you might look into the runt gem.

This gem is implemented as a mixin, so that you can do the following:

require 'temporal_object'
include TemporalObject

Will add instance methods to manipulate TimeLines (and thereby TimeSpans and RelativeTimes) to the including object.

Most of the temporal aspects for Temporal Object are delegated to TimeSpan. The Temporal Object just has any number of TimeSpan statuses.

More information on TimeSpan:

• rdoc
• github
• rubygems

Note: this implementation is quite changed from gem version 0.0.3, where TemporalObjects needed to be created, which pointed to your actual object. Code has been simplified thereby, and is much cleaner.

Note 2: The presence (for now) of rspec-expectations-2.9.1 gem will cause 'gem test' to fail. The gem has been written so a clean slate of gems (e.g., a new gemset) will allow the correct version to install, and then 'gem test' should pass.