Question

I am just starting Ruby and learning the concept of modules. I understand that one use of modules is to better organize your code and avoid name clashes. Let’s say I have bunch of modules like this (I haven’t included the implementation as that’s not important)
:

module Dropbox

  class Base

    def initialize(a_user)
    end

  end  

  class Event < Base

    def newFile?
    end

    def newImage?
    end

  end

  class Action < Base

    def saveFile(params)
    end

  end

end

and another module:

module CustomURL

  class Base

    def initialize(a_user, a_url, a_method, some_args, a_regex)
    end

  end

  class Event < Base

    def initialize(a_user, a_url, a_method, some_args, a_regex)
    end

    def change?
    end

  end

  class Action < Base

    def send_request(params)
    end

  end

end

I am going to have a bunch of these modules (10+, for gmail, hotmail, etc…). What I am trying to figure out is, is this the right way to organize my code?

Basically, I am using module to represent a “service” and all services will have a common interface class (base for initializing, action for list of actions and event for monitoring).

Answer 1

You are defining families of related or dependent classes here. Your usage of modules as namespaces for these families is correct.

Also with this approach it would be easy to build abstract factory for your classes if they had compatible interface. But as far as I see this is not the case for current classes design: for example Dropbox::Event and CustomURL::Event have completely different public methods.

You can reevaluate design of your classes and see if it is possible for them to have uniform interface so that you can use polymorphism and extract something like BaseEvent and BaseAction so that all Events and Actions will derive from these base classes.

Update: As far as you define services, it might be useful to define top-level module like Service and put all your classes inside this module. It will improve modularity of your system. If in the future you would refactor out some base classes for your modules services, you can put them in the top-level namespace. Then your objects will have readable names like these:

Service::Dropbox::Event
Service::Dropbox::Action
Service::CustomURL::Event
Service::CustomURL::Action
Service::BaseEvent
Service::BaseAction