README.md

Dex

What is dex?

Have you ever seen this?:

# some_class.rb:
class SomeClass
  # ...
end

# some_class_decorator.rb:
module SomeClassDecorator
  # ...
end

# config/initializers/decorators.rb:
config.to_prepare do
  SomeClass.send :include, SomeClassDecorator
  ...
  ...
  ...
end

What's so bad about this?

It destroys Rails' lazy loading. Every Class with a decorator get's preloaded, on every request (in development mode). Not lazy-loaded, preloaded in this initializer, even if it's never being used. That's incredibly slow. And sucks.

So what was dex now?

It's just a lightweight extension to ActiveSupport::Dependencies to support lazy-loaded decorators. You still have to register decorators in an initializer, but it won't cause a preload, but register a callback to load and include the decorator as soon as it's base-class gets lazy-loaded:

# some_class.rb:
class SomeClass
  # ...
end

# some_class_decorator.rb:
module SomeClassDecorator
  # ...
end

# config/initializers/dex.rb
ActiveSupport::Dependencies.register_dex 'SomeClass', 'SomeClassDecorator'
...