/ 
Gloom-0.25
River stage zero No dependents
/ Gloom

NAME

Gloom - Gloom (the Great Little OO Module)

gloom-pm gloom-pm

SYNOPSIS

In your Makefile.PL:

use inc::Module::Install;
name 'MyMod';
use_gloom 'MyMod::OO';

then in lib/MyMod/Foo.pm:

package MyMod::Foo;
use MyMod::OO -base;

has 'foo';

and:

package MyMod::Foo::Bar;
use MyMod::Foo -base;

has 'bar';

NOTE

Module::Install is not required to use Gloom. It just makes it a trivial process. If you don't use Module::Install, you can manually copy/symlink Gloom.pm to your lib/MyMod/OO.pm.

DESCRIPTION

Gloom is a simple, clean and small OO base module. It can be used by CPAN modules that need to be OO, but don't want to require a dependency module to do it.

Gloom provides the OO basics like single inheritance, standard new and init constructor methods, and has attribute accessors. It also turns on strict and warnings automatically.

Gloom is cascading. Using Gloom as a base class for class Foo, enables Foo to later be used as a Gloomy base class. Using the -base syntax invokes all the Gloom functionality.

WHENCE GLOOM?

Using basic idiomatic OO in Perl is problematic. Perl provides the lowest level mechanisms, but this is not even the bare minimum that you would find useable. You'd want at least an object constructor and attribute accessors.

Moose and friends is the way to do serious OO right, but Moose has issues too. Imagine you want to write a very simple CPAN module, and want to do it in the OO style. Adding a Moose prerequisite feels like adding an army tank to a flower arrangement. It's a huge installation pain for your users if its not already installed, and it still carries a startup performance penalty.

This is where Gloom comes in. Gloom is a CPAN module author's friend. It provides Perl OO basics with No Dependency Prerequisites. You simply copy or symlink Gloom.pm as your module's OO base module, then Gloom will figure out the rest.

The great lesson of Module::Install is that you can fix deficiencies in standard things like ExtUtils::MakeMaker or even perl itself, by shipping a little extra code with each module. With Gloom, you always ship Gloom.pm, renamed as your OO base module.

If you use Module::Install, all you need to do is add a line to your Makefile.PL file. It will create a Gloom based OO module for you and keep it up to date. Just imagine, all your Perl OO needs resolved with one line in a Makefile.PL! See Module::Install::Gloom for details.

The great lesson of Spiffy was OO feature propagation/cascading. When a module is a Gloom subclass, it can be used as a first-rate Gloom base class.

Spiffy was not well received by some people because it used source filtering for a couple unrelated things. Just for the record, Gloom uses no source filtering or any other fancy magics.

Gloom has nothing except the OO primitives that everyone wants. Gloom simply makes basic Perl OO something that you don't need to worry about any more.

FEATURES

Gloom provides the following features:

Usage, Inheritance and Cascading

When you use a Gloom subclass module, you can pass it the -base option to establish single inheritance to that module. In other words, that module becomes your module's base or parent class.

package My::Foo;
use My::OO -base;

Now you are free to use My::Foo as a base class for some other class:

package Your::Foo;
use My::Foo -base;

has 'what_you_want';

My::Foo has all the exact same powers of OO cascading as Gloom itself.

Note that My::OO is an exact copy of Gloom.pm. You don't change anything in the file. The code sees how it was called and adapts the package name on the fly.

Constructor

Gloom has a new() class method. It creates an object and calls $self- >init(@_).

The default init() method expects its arguments to be a list of attribute name/value pairs. You can easily subclass init() to do things differently.

Attribute Accessor Generators

Gloom provides has accessors that work exactly like the field accessors from Class::Field. (has is the Perl standard name for attribute generators). The attributes are always read/write. They provide an optional default value as well as an optional initialization code snippet.

package Foo;
use Bar -base;

has 'this';
has 'that' => {};    # Defaults to a hash;
has 'thus', -init => '$self->set_thus';

You can also mark them to support method chaining:

has 'this', -chain;
has 'that';

$self->this('one')->that('two');

NOTE: Gloom has() is completely different in usage from Moose has().

Exporting

Gloom and all its subclasses export the has() function. You can have your base class export more things by simply defining the Exporter variables, like:

our @EXPORT = qw(foo bar);
our @EXPORT_OK = qw(baz);
Other Stuff

Since the has generators always return a true value, you usually don't need the annoying:

1;

line at the bottom of your Gloom based modules. The true value they return is the Perl source code of the accessor. You can see this by doing something like:

print has 'foo' -init => '$self->init_foo';

Like Moose, using Gloom (or any subclass of Gloom) as a base class, will automagically do the equivalent of:

use strict;
use warnings;

REPOSITORY AND COMMUNITY

The Gloom module can be found on CPAN and on GitHub: "/github.com/ingydotnet/gloom- pm" in http:.

Please join #gloom on irc.perl.org to discuss the new Gloom of Perl.

AUTHOR

ingy döt Net <ingy@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2010-2014. Ingy döt Net.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

See http://www.perl.com/perl/misc/Artistic.html