NAME

Refinements - safer monkey-patching; Ruby-2.0-style refinements for Perl

SYNOPSIS

BEGIN {
   package LwpDebugging;
   use Refinements;
   
   refine 'LWP::UserAgent::request' => sub
   {
      my $next = shift;  # like Moose's "around" modifier
      my $self = shift;
      
      warn sprintf 'REQUEST: %s %s', $_[0]->method, $_[0]->uri;
      
      return $self->$next(@_);
   };
};

{
   package MyApp;
   
   use LWP::UserAgent;
   
   my $ua  = LWP::UserAgent->new;
   my $req = HTTP::Request->new(GET => 'http://www.example.com/');
   
   {
      use LwpDebugging;
      
      my $res = $ua->request($req);   # issues debugging warning
      
      # $ua->get internally calls $ua->request
      my $res2 = $ua->get('http://www.example.org/');  # no warning
   }
   
   my $res = $ua->request($req);  # no warning
}

DESCRIPTION

Refinements allows you to define Ruby-2.0-style refinements. Refinements are a lexically-scoped monkey-patch. In the SYNOPSIS example, we're using a refinement that overrides LWP::UserAgent's request method. The refinement only gets applied in the small block of code where use LwpDebugging appears. Calling the request method from outside that block ignores the refinement. Refinements are lexically-scoped rather than dynamically-scoped.

Refinements can be used to add or override aspects of a class' behaviour, as an alternative to subclassing.

Credit where it's due: all the hard work is done by Method::Lexical. The Refinements module just provides an interface to Method::Lexical that may be more comfortable to many users. Defining a refinement becomes much like defining method modifiers in Moose or Moo.

In particular, the Refinements module does a two things:

1. It makes your package inherit from Refinements::Package; and

2. It exports a convenience function refine to your package.

Functions

The following function is exported:

refine(@names, $coderef)

This is roughly equivalent to:

$your_package->add_refinement($_, $coderef) for @names;

See "Methods" in Refinements::Package for further information on the add_refinement method.

BUGS

Please report any bugs to http://rt.cpan.org/Dist/Display.html?Queue=Refinements.

SEE ALSO

Refinements::Package, Method::Lexical.

AUTHOR

Toby Inkster <tobyink@cpan.org>.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE

This software is copyright (c) 2013 by Toby Inkster.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.

DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTIES

THIS PACKAGE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.