Disqus - Latest Comments for Me

Re: First Post!

Me — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 21:13:54 -0000

test

Re: Monkeypatching is Destroying Ruby

Me — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 12:24:09 -0000

@andrew:

> You do monkey-patch in your NullDB. You reopen AR::Base to add a nulldb_connection method.

True. This, unfortunately, is part of the contract of the
ActiveRecord connection adapter API - you are expected to do this if
you want connection_establish :adapter => :foo to work. Whether this
is a true "monkey patch" is debatable; a lot of people only consider
such a thing a monkey patch if it actually *redefines* existing
methods. Of course, the Rails guys could easily have avoided the
whole question by giving us a less-silly API that allowed us to simply
register a new database connection class.

> Subclassing isn't always possible. With AR::Base subclasses have special
> semantic meaning, ie. Single Table Inheritance. That is why everything with
> ActiveRecord is done through mix-ins +/or eval. (You can subclass AR::Base
> not for STI but it's a pain)

It's not a pain, you just set abstract_class = true.

> Whether it is the Rails framework or a plugin, understand it enough to debug
> it. Then you can eval as much as you like.

This is easy to say, but in real world large projects it simply isn't
feasible to understand all of the code in the project, let alone all
of the third-party code it depends on. That is why community
conventions are essential for maintainability.

Thanks for the comment!

Re: Sustainable Development in Ruby, Part 1: Good Old-Fashioned Inheritance

Me — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 17:37:26 -0000

Pat: I understand your point, but this was the inheritance post :-) Composition will come later.

Re: Announcing Ninja-Patching!

Me — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:05:20 -0000

Paul: sorry about the lost comment. I'm increasingly not a fan of WordPress, period.

Re: Why Your Social Website Should Support OpenID

Me — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 20:33:53 -0000

Giles, I'm a user. I'm speaking as a user, and nothing else. OpenID is of genuine value to me as a user. It is convenient and makes my life easier. Perhaps every other user in the world maps to your model and finds no use at all in it. But for me it has real utility. Chris was looking for how it was useful, and so (I thought) were you, and now I've explained it.

Re: Phenomenal Cosmic Power

Me — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:43:28 -0000

JMAGS: Thanks! I don't know what I was thinking.

Re: alias_method_chain :alias_method_chain, :awesome (or, how I learned to stop worrying and made Python nation and anyone else afraid of monkey-patching my bitch)

Me — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:16:00 -0000

Not bad, just needlessly overused. I hope you read the whole article, not just the title. The followups ([first](http://avdi.org/devblog/2008/02/25/followup-to-monkeypatching-is-destroying-ruby/), [second](http://avdi.org/devblog/2008/02/25/full-disclosure/)) hopefully clarify some more.

I actually think *alias_method_chain* is slightly less dangerous than some other techniques, because at least it's a convention and a way to avoid silently stomping existing methods. But that's a good technique for the environments where *alias_method_chain* is available, and I may utilize it next time I'm debugging unexpected behavior in Rails. Thanks!