renamed some recipes in prep for adding extension intro

[gitmo/Moose.git] / lib / Moose / Cookbook / Extending / Recipe3.pod

=pod

=head1 NAME

Moose::Cookbook::Extending::Recipe1 - Providing an alternate base object class

=head1 SYNOPSIS

  package MyApp::Base;
  use Moose;

  extends 'Moose::Object';

  before 'new' => sub { warn "Making a new " . $_[0] };

  no Moose;

  package MyApp::UseMyBase;
  use Moose ();
  use Moose::Exporter;

  Moose::Exporter->setup_import_methods( also => 'Moose' );

  sub init_meta {
      shift;
      Moose->init_meta( @_, base_class => 'MyApp::Object' );
  }

=head1 DESCRIPTION

Often you find that you want to share some behavior between all your
classes. One way to do that is to make a base class and simply add
C<S<extends 'MyApp::Base'>> to every class in your
application. However, that can get tedious. Instead, you can simply
create your Moose-alike module that sets the base object class to
C<MyApp::Base> for you.

Then, instead of writing C<S<use Moose>> you can write C<S<use
MyApp::UseMyBase>>.

In this particular example, our base class issues some debugging
output every time a new object is created, but you can surely think of
some more interesting things to do with your own base class.

This all works because of the magic of L<Moose::Exporter>. When we
call C<< Moose::Exporter->setup_import_methods( also => 'Moose' ) >>
it builds an C<import> and C<unimport> method for you. The C<< also =>
'Moose' >> bit says that we want to export everything that Moose does.

The C<import> method that gets created will call our C<init_meta>
method, passing it C<< for_caller => $caller >> as its arguments. The
C<$caller> is set to the class that actually imported us in the first
place.

See the L<Moose::Exporter> docs for more details on its API.

=head1 USING MyApp::UseMyBase

To actually use our new base class, we simply use C<MyApp::UseMyBase>
I<instead> of C<Moose>. We get all the Moose sugar plus our new base
class.

  package Foo;

  use MyApp::UseMyBase;

  has 'size' => ( is => 'rw' );

  no MyApp::UseMyBase;

=head1 AUTHOR

Dave Rolsky E<lt>autarch@urth.orgE<gt>

=head1 COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright 2006-2008 by Infinity Interactive, Inc.

L<http://www.iinteractive.com>

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

=cut