Ruby Best Practices

Conclusions

The difficulty of designing a solid API for a given problem depends largely on the problem itself. However, we’ve seen in this chapter that Ruby is pretty much happy to get out of your way and provide you with an enormous amount of flexibility so that you can more easily design what you had in mind, rather than what Matz thinks you should do.

When developing your interfaces, be sure to actually use them in order to drive them along. In this way, you are forced to eat your own dog food, and this ensures that the API ends up satisfying the goal of working nicely rather than simply looking nice from a distance. You can gain a lot of inspiration by looking at the way in which the core Ruby objects are designed, API-wise. The best way to make your code more Rubyish is to make it work like core Ruby objects do whenever you can. Of course, like anything else, trying to stretch this idea too far can be disastrous. In moderation, however, this general approach combined with the technical details in this chapter should put you on your way to writing solid Ruby libraries in no time, or, failing that, should clean up your existing code a bit and make it easier to work with.