From: dmcnulty@... (Dan McNulty)
Date: 2002-02-21T07:19:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Global variables, mod_ruby

I am currently also using HTML Template
(http://www.0xfa.com/~ikechin/ruby.html) so I can easily separate my
HTML from my Ruby.  I cannot stand mingling HTML and a language (it
seems so ugly to me), so eruby is out.

What this means is I have a group of pure Ruby files and a group of
pure HTML templates. I am trying hard to keep my code modular, and so
I call functions and instantiate objects that are defined in "load"ed
files.

Of course as you noted, doing this in a web environment introduces
some problems because of the way Apache does its thing with mod_ruby. 
The net effect is that globals don't work in the normal Ruby way and
therefore a work-around is needed.

I am currently trying to use CGI::Session to store the global
variables, which was working, but now its broken again and I can't
figure out what I did :-(

What I may do is collapse all the globals and return values into a
hash and just pass the hash from function-to-function, and always
return the same hash back to the caller.  This works, but boy is this
ugly!  Not a very Ruby-ish way of doing things, nor is it good
practice in any language.

I think I may be encountering life on the frontier, as Ruby does not
seem to be used a great deal for web apps.  It may be that the tools
are just not quite mature enough yet, or it could be I am just not
inventive enough :-)

What I really want is for mod_ruby to allow Ruby to act like itself. 
That would be the best thing IMHO.

-- Dan


Alan Chen <alan@digikata.com> wrote in message news:<20020220192350.GB2033@digikata.com>...
> On Thu, Feb 21, 2002 at 01:39:01AM +0900, Dan McNulty wrote:
> > I see Shugo stated (back in July 2001) that the use of global
> > variables when using mod_ruby doesn't work.  I am using mod_ruby 0.9.7
> > and it seems support for globals hasn't changed since July.
> > 
> > I very much want to use globals since my alternatives are:
> > a) added complexity in the interfaces to certain of my functions
> > b) placing all my code into a single file
> > 
> > I don't want to do either of those.  Actually, I don't plan  to use
> > globals in the long term, but it is simple and quick.  I will do it
> > the right way later.
> > 
> > Does anyone know of any plans to support globals properly using
> > mod_ruby, or is there a replacement for mod_ruby that does support
> > globals, or is there another alternative to globals besides "a" and
> > "b" that I don't know about?
> > 
> > Thanks in advance for any help.
> > 
> > -- Dan
> 
> How exactly do you intend to use the globals?  I'm not sure that you
> can ever expect to pass data between pages using global variables
> when you might have several different apache processes, each with a
> different "interpreter-space".
> 
> Re: option b, your code can go into regular ruby files and be required
> into eruby pages or ruby scripts. You can split up your code however
> it best makes sense to you. I'm not sure how you'd like to use these
> globals, but if you have a number of related functions, you can put
> then into a common module or class.
> 
> -- alan