Metaphor

From the Greek: μεταφορά - metaphora, meaning "transfer"

Rationale

As programmers an awful lot of what we do revolves around taking an input, doing something to it, and sending the result somewhere. Quite a bit of time is wasted writing the "glue" that transfers the results from one place to the next. Metaphor aims to provide a standardised and easy to use way of passing results, leaving you to concentrate on the bit that's important - the business logic.

Programming with Metaphor

metaphor = Metaphor.new
metaphor.processors << Foo.new
metaphor.processors << Bar.new
metaphor.processors << Baz.new
metaphor.processors << Metaphor::Processor::PrintMessage.new

# Process one message
metaphor.call("Hello, Metaphor!") # => "Hello, Metaphor!"
                                  # => false (if halted by processor)

# Process messages from this class until the Ruby VM is killed or the
# input returns nil
metaphor.call(StdinInput.new)

Classes used for input must respond to #gets and return a String (or at least something that quacks like a String):

class StdinInput
  def gets
    line = STDIN.gets
    line == "" ? nil : line
  end
end

Classes used as processors must respond to #call(headers, body):

class PrintMessage
  def call(message)
    puts "Message : #{message.inspect}"
  end
end

The return value of #call controls what happens to the message. If the processor returns:

• false
  • Metaphor stops processing this message and discards it
• nil
  • Metaphor passes the same object that were passed into the processor to the next processor in the chain
• Anything else
  • Metaphor passes this to the next processor

Contributing

• Fork the project.
• Make your feature addition or bug fix.
• Add tests for it. This is important so I don't break it in a future version unintentionally.
• Commit, do not mess with the Rakefile or Metaphor::VERSION. If you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull.
• Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.

Authors

• Sean O'Halpin
• Craig R Webster http://barkingiguana.com/

License

Released under the MIT licence. See the LICENSE file for details.