Inherit, Delegate, or Forwarding?

ruby-talk
1

When do you guys choose to inherit from a class, use a delegate, or
forwarding?
What are some examples of common uses for Delegates or Forwardable?

I have these fuzzy notions of times they may be useful, but some common
examples would be nice.

Any thought?
  .adam

For reference:
[Forwardable]
http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/forwardable/rdoc/index.html
[Delegate] http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/delegate/rdoc/index.html

2

When do you guys choose to inherit from a class, use a delegate, or
forwarding?

As the saying goes, "Favor composition over inheritance." The theory there is simply that inheritance is a tighter coupling than composition, so the latter handles change better. Delegation is a form of composition.

Any Design Patterns book will have a detailed treatment of this very topic.

What are some examples of common uses for Delegates or Forwardable?

Well, I wrote the documentation for both, and I must confess that I still rarely use Delegate. It can think of one example where I wanted full delegation and I wanted it for two classes, so I had to roll my own anyway. The best example I can think of for it is TempFile[1], in the standard library.

I use forwardable all the time, on the other hand. I love that library. It allows me to control what gets delegated and rename delegated methods. Good stuff. Two examples from my work would be my solution-in-progress to the Ruby Test First Challenge[2] and my FasterCSV library[3].

Hope that helps.

1: http://stonecode.org:3000/articles/show_all
2: http://groups.google.com/group/Ruby-Test-First-Challenge/msg/1df37a6f0b781a88
3: http://rubyforge.org/plugins/scmsvn/viewcvs.php/trunk/lib/faster_csv.rb?root=fastercsv&view=markup

James Edward Gray II

···

On Jan 5, 2006, at 12:12 PM, Adam Sanderson wrote:

3

James Edward Gray II wrote:

I use forwardable all the time, on the other hand. I love that library. It allows me to control what gets delegated and rename delegated methods. Good stuff. Two examples from my work would be my solution-in-progress to the Ruby Test First Challenge[2] and my FasterCSV library[3].

Note that, with some help, I revamped forwardable.rb and it has been tentatively accepted by Matz for 2.0. The current version has lots of warning spewage.

http://rubyforge.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1923&group_id=426&atid=1700

Regards,

Dan