DIM is Jim Weirich's minimalistic dependency injection framework, maintained in gem form by Mike Subelsky.
Dependency injection lets you organize all of your app's object setup code in one place by creating a container. Whenver an object in your application needs access to another object or resource, it asks the container to provide it (using lazily-evaluated code blocks).
When testing your code, you can either stub out services on the container, or you can provide a substitute container.
The following could be in a "lib.init.rb" file or in a Rails app, "config/initializers/container.rb":
require "dim" require "logger" require 'game' require 'event_handler' require 'transmitter' ServerContainer = Dim::Container.new ServerContainer.register(:transmitter) { |c| Transmitter.new(c.logger) } ServerContainer.register(:event_handler) do |c| eh = EventHandler.new eh.transmitter = c.transmitter eh.logger = c.logger eh end ServerContainer.register(:listening_host) { "0.0.0.0" } ServerContainer.register(:listening_port) { "8080" } ServerContainer.register(:game) do |c| game = Game.new game.logger = c.logger game.event_handler = c.event_handler game.host = c.listening_host game.port = c.listening_port game end ServerContainer.register(:root_dir) do |c| Pathname.new(File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/..")) end ServerContainer.register(:log_file_path) do |c| "#{c.root_dir}/log/#{c.environment}.log" end ServerContainer.register(:logger) do |c| Logger.new(c.log_file_path) end # attempts to read ENV["API_PASSWORD"], otherwise makes sure that the parent container has # a service named api_password registered ServerContainer.register_env(:api_password) Using the above code elsewhere in the app, when you want a reference to the app's logger object:
ServerContainer.logger.info("I didn't have to setup my own logger") Or if you wanted access to the game instance created during setup (which already is configured with everything it needs):
current_game = ServerContainer.game If you don't like creating even the one dependency on the global constant ServerContainer, you could inject ServerContainer itself into your objects like so:
World.new(GameContainer) Jim wrote a nice article explaining the rationale for this code and how it works. Also check out his slides.
Dim is available under the MIT license (see the file LICENSE for details).