masover-autoloader

A couple of handy features to enhance Kernel#autoload.

Features

• Fire Kernel#autoload at an entire directory
• Fire it again at a subdirectory, for namespace'd models

Motivation/Examples

I was using Ramaze as a web framework, and discovered that the standard Ramaze way of loading a directory of files is to slurp them all (with 'acquire'). I decided I'd rather use autoload, and not load things I'm not using. But I wasn't really looking forward to this:

autoload :User, 'model/user' autoload :Clan, 'model/clan' autoload :Item, 'model/item'

...ad nauseum. So, the first feature is a shallow, directory-based autoload:

AutoLoader << 'model'

Of course, being a pedant, I like to namespace my models. I don't want to slurp the entire directory tree. Instead, you can do this:

class User < MyFavoriteORM::Model include AutoLoader ... end

Now, all AutoLoaded paths will be searched for a subdirectory called 'user', and all files within will be autoloaded. Just as if you'd done:

User.autoload :Anonymous, 'model/user/anonymous' User.autoload :Registered, 'model/user/registered'

Of course, there's no requirement that you have a base class, or anything of the sort. If you just want a namespace, you can always do:

module MyNamespace; include AutoLoader; end

And you're done.

Compatibility

Currently, Merb's extlib and Rails' activesupport are supported. It should be trivial to interface with other libraries.