From: Florian Gilcher <flo@...>
Date: 2009-12-08T09:56:21+09:00
Subject: Re: how to understand Ruby code? (noting various mixins/includes) Is  there a tool to assist here?


On Dec 7, 2009, at 8:45 PM, Tony Arcieri wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 4:47 PM, Greg Hauptmann <
> greg.hauptmann.ruby@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Just trying to make sense of the final object structure and where  
>> methods
>> resides seems to be a challenge.  The latest one I've been looking at
>> are things like AuthLogic and Paperclip which are used in the Rails
>> world.
>>
>
> I feel your pain, especially with AuthLogic.  It's very difficult to  
> follow
> how methods are dispatched among a quagmire of mixins.


I found that YARD does a good job at finding static relationships  
between classes
as well as informing you about them. It also provides a tool that  
draws you a graph
out of them (yard-graph).

For a sample: http://yardoc.org/docs/datamapper-dm-core/DataMapper/ 
Model (includes
2 modules, extends another one, is defined in more then one file and  
defines multiple
helper classes and modules under his namespace.

It's not 100%, but catches most reasonable cases. For more gathering,  
there is still
Kernel#set_trace_fun. I experimented with a visualization for that for  
university,
but it explodes horribly quick.

Regards,
Florian Gilcher