Dear fellow monks, I'm seeking comments on a new module I've written, including suggestions for improving its name before I release an initial version to CPAN. This module started as a thought exercise coming out of Abigail's talk at YAPC::NA on Lexical::Attributes and Ingy's talks about Spiffy. It's now reached the point where the basics are working and it might be of interest. The working name is "Object::Local". Here's a quick example of use:
package My::Object; use strict; use Object::Local; give_methods our $self; our $name : Prop; our $color : Prop; sub as_string : Method { return ref($self) . " named '$name' with color '$color'"; } 1; __ELSEWHERE__ use My::Object; my $o = My::Object->new; $o->set_name("xdg")->set_color("orange"); print $o->as_string; __RESULT__ My::Object: named 'xdg' with color 'orange'
At its core, this module helps create inside-out objects. It does some things like Lexical::Attributes and Spiffy, but in some different (better? worse?) ways. Like those modules, it's a bit unusual compared to other object/class generators out there and has some of its own unique approaches:
- Provides $self automatically to methods -- without source filtering
- Provides dynamic aliasing of properties within methods, eliminating accessor calls in methods -- again, without source filtering
- Uses attributes to mark properties and methods, but only in the BEGIN phase so should be mod_perl friendly (though I haven't tested this yet)
- Under the hood, uses local() and dynamic scoping of package variables ($self, et al.) while remaining 'strict' friendly
Suggestions for a better name are welcome. Some criteria I'd like to apply to the naming include:
- evocative -- the name should convey some salient point about the module
- relatively short -- the whole point of the module is less typing so a long name is counterproductive
- catchy -- it would be nice to stand out from the zillions of Class:: modules since this actually is pretty wierd and different
- not too frivolous -- e.g. "Spiffy" meets the above three but is a bit on the frivolous side (sorry, Ingy)
I've considered variations such as:
- Object/Class::Less -- 'less' typing for the programmer, plus a bit of a pun
- Class::Selfless -- more specific on the "less"
- Object::Voodoo -- lots of under-the-hood namespace munging, function wrapping, etc. to make this work
- Object::Dynamic -- dynamic scoping tricks heavily used throughout
- Class::OutsideIn -- like InsideOut, but the global/local trick is another type of inversion
Your early feedback on functionality or names is appreciated. When I release the module, I'll have more detailed commentary on the internals, speed benchmarks, and pros/cons versus other approaches.
Thank you,
-xdg
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