I've been experimenting with ideas to allow people to create their own Perl objects via a web application. The objects will execute in a server framework (becoming application components).

As people may refine and redefine methods within these objects, I have come up with the following way to "refresh" the existing objects on the fly. (The Everything engine uses eval liberally, but that imposes performance constraints I wish to avoid, if at all possible.) Is there a better way than this?

#!/usr/bin/perl -w -I"/home/chromatic/perl"

use strict;
use Sub;

my $tester = Sub->new();
$tester->name;

{
    local *OUTPUT;
    open(OUTPUT, ">>/home/chromatic/perl/Sub.pm") || die "Can't append
+: $!\n";
    print OUTPUT "\nsub game {\n";
    print OUTPUT "  print \"Hi, this is the game subroutine.\\n\";\n";
    print OUTPUT "}\n";
    print OUTPUT "1;";
    close OUTPUT || die "Can't close: $!\n";
}

require "/home/chromatic/perl/Sub.pm";
$tester = Sub->new;
$tester->game;
[download]

and the Sub.pm file is, initially:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

package Sub;

use strict;

sub new {
    my $class = shift;
    my $this = {};
    $class = ref($class) || $class;
    bless($this, $class);
    return $this;
}

sub name {
    print "Hi, this is the name subroutine.\n";
}

1;
[download]

This seems to work (aside from having extra 1; statements in the code :), but I get "Subroutine ___ redefined" errors. That makes sense... but is there a better way to do it?

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