From: Bruce Williams <bruce@...>
Date: 2003-04-04T22:08:13+09:00
Subject: Re: Plugins (sort off)

On Thursday 03 April 2003 06:25 pm, Damphyr wrote:
| Well I *am* new to Ruby, been playing around for about three weeks now
| (well, whenever I can think after work anyway) and while playing around
| I put together a very primitive (in my opinion) way of making plugins.
| Well calling it plugins probably is the wrong thing to do - let's say
| that I like distributing my code in small files all over the place
| because I hate scrolling and I like putting it together again
| programmatically.

This may not address your question-- but certainly the easiest way I've ever 
seen plugins accomplished in Ruby follows the following (fairly popular) 
pattern:

--snip--

class Plugin
  AVAILABLE = []
  def Plugin.inherited plugin_class
    AVAILABLE << plugin_class
  end
end

class PluginA < Plugin; end
class PluginB < Plugin; end
class PluginC < Plugin; end

--snip--

If you're looking for an advanced plugin framework for Ruby, I'd suggest you 
check out FreeBase (http://www.rubyide.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?FreeBASE), which 
is really sweet.

Hope that helps,
// Bruce
( who's odd enough to think that a YAML type for ruby-lang posts/replies would 
be awesome )