module / class best practices

[Joe Van Dyk]

I'm writing some code that generates an image file based off either a
binary file or shared memory.

I figure that I need three functions:

generate_image_from_file # public
generate_image_from_shmem #public
generate_image # private?

The user would call either generate_image_from_file or
generate_image_from_shmem. Once the data has been loaded, both
functions would call generate_image to write the image to a file
somewhere.

Would this be best written as a class inside a module? Or a set of
functions inside a module? I'm not really storing any data, and
there's no point in keeping the object around after the image is
generated.

Thanks,
Joe

 

[Austin Ziegler]

I'm writing some code that generates an image file based off
either a binary file or shared memory.

I figure that I need three functions:

generate_image_from_file # public
generate_image_from_shmem # public
generate_image # private?

The user would call either generate_image_from_file or
generate_image_from_shmem. Once the data has been loaded, both
functions would call generate_image to write the image to a file
somewhere.

Would this be best written as a class inside a module? Or a set of
functions inside a module? I'm not really storing any data, and
there's no point in keeping the object around after the image is
generated.

I think that you're looking at it wrong. The way that I'd do it is
to have generate_image be the public version that accepts either a
binary block of data (e.g., a binary String) or an IO-like object
that responds to #read.

Then, look at putting a shmem wrapper that responds to #read.

-austin