in reply to Foo::Button->new vs. newButton()

I not a fan of the idea of exporting procedural-style class constructors from modules, since it kind of hides the OO, and a symbol like "newButton" could be handy to users of your library elsewhere. IMHO exporting symbols can get real messy, real fast.

There is always the not-so-great indirect object syntax: 

$b = new Foo::Button @args

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but that can sometimes be more trouble than its worth.

What about the syntax length bothers you? Are your modules nested deeply? (ex: Olga::Ming::Widgets::Button) If so, you could create your own class loader for your framework. I have done this with the object framework I have been working on and it works quite well. Here is the syntax : 

use iI::Framework qw(
    Web.Request
    Web.ModPerl.DispatchHandler
    );

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Then the iI::Framework module's import method simply changes all the "."s to "/"s and requires each module. After that the modules can then be refered to as "Request" and "DispatchHandler" instead of "iI::Web::Request" and "iI::Web::ModPerl::DispatchHandler". Its a little weird (maybe not terribly perl-ish), but it keeps my module name length down and still allows me to organize the almost 100 different classes I have into a neat tidy folder heirarchy.

-stvn

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Re: Re: Foo::Button->new vs. newButton()
by bakunin (Scribe) on Jan 16, 2004 at 19:52 UTC
    No, no the class names are not long at all. But thanks for the input. Well, it hides OO to some point. And I should of course put the symbol exported in EXPORT_OK.

    As for the length, well... this is a static method. And no inheritance is needed beyond Foo::Button along the library. So why write Foo::Button->new and many others (for Text,Menu,FadeMenu,MovieClip,... ) where I can just get away with newFoo()
    It was just a thought. :))
    Thanks.
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      Just because you dont inherit it, doesn't mean someone else wont want to.

      -stvn
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        Incidentally, if you wanted to get that syntax elsewhere you could provide an autoload routine:-

        sub AUTOLOAD {
    my $f = $AUTOLOAD;
    $f=~s/.*:://;
    if ($f =~ /^new(.*)/) {
    return $1->new(@_);
    } else {
    die "Undefined subroutine: $f";
    }
}

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        I don't think it's a very good idea though, and that wouldn't give you a Foo::Button, just a button. Probably not good at all :) You can do all sorts of interesting things with AUTOLOAD

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