joelplane / easyload

An alternative to autoload that relies on your project's directory structure to determine its module hierarchy, recursively.

Easyload

An alternative to autoload that relies on your project's directory structure to determine its module hierarchy, recursively.

This is an opinionated loading method that attempts to simplify your development process by enforcing that your directory and file names follow convention and are consistent with your project's module hierarchy. Additionally, it allows for painless refactoring and reduces code repetition by removing the need of declaring your module hierarchy in every single source file. The project's directory structure determines that; it's just extra work to keep the two in sync.

Easyload frowns upon the require statement, and would much rather that your library know how to load itself. Simply reference the constant that you want, and it's there.

General Use

To easyload a project, it must define at least one top level module to be used as the easyload root. From that root, and the search path that it defines, all child constants are easyloaded according to your directory structure.

For example, with a directory structure of:

lib/ 
  my_easyloaded_module.rb
  my_easyloaded_module/
    child_module.rb
    child_module/
      leafy.rb
    node.rb

lib/my_easyloaded_module.rb:

module MyEasyloadedModule
  import Easyload
end

lib/my_easyloaded_module/child_module.rb:

module ChildModule
  ... 
end

lib/my_easyloaded_module/child_module/leafy.rb:

class Leafy
  ...
end

lib/my_easyloaded_module/node.rb:

class Node
  ...
end

Would result in the following module/class hierarchy being easyloadable:

MyEasyloadedModule
MyEasyloadedModule::ChildModule
MyEasyloadedModule::ChildModule::Leafy
MyEasyloadedModule::Node

Easyload Configuration

When a class or module includes Easyload, the Easyload::SingletonExtensions module is mixed into that class or module's singleton methods, providing the easyload API. See Easyload::SingletonExtensions for a reference of what configuration can be performed on an easyloaded class or module.