Cleaning up Ruby-EFL

Posted at 2006-02-22

Wow. I wrote most of Ruby-EFL (that's everything but Ruby-EET :P) in summer 2004, when I knew close to nothing about Ruby's internals and its C api. It shows. I recently started writing another application with it, and noticed that you couldn't even inherit from Ecore::Evas::SoftwareX11, for example. That's because I implemented Class.new for all of the classes instead of writing a proper initialize method. Fixing that up led to some great code cleanup, and I'm very happy with the codebase now. These changes are fully backwards compatible, too.

The API has changed for Ecore::EventHandler. You now add event handlers like this:

Ecore::EventHandler.new(Ecore::SignalExitEvent) { |ev| ... }

ie you just pass the event class instead of a stupid constant :)

The next thing I poked at is the Evas::Smart API. Not sure what I was thinking when I wrote the Ruby class back then...

Now it works like this:

# Inherit from Evas::Smart
# Done :D

The name for the smart class will be generated from the class path of the Ruby class. That way you cannot customize it but I don't think anyone would want to do so anyway.

Sorry 'bout the API b0rkage, but I think you'll agree that it's mucho better now :)

Update

Whoops, I forgot to write about how it's now possible to define Ecore events in Ruby :)

It's really easy, look:

class SomethingEvent < Ecore::Event
    attr_reader :foo, :bar

    def initialize(arg1, arg2)
        super()

        @foo, @bar = arg1, arg2
    end
end

To raise that event, you'd call:

SomethingEvent.raise(arg1, arg2)

Isn't that nice? :)

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