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by Jay Fields.
Original Post: Rails: Where do you require?
Feed Title: Jay Fields Thoughts
Feed URL: http://blog.jayfields.com/rss.xml
Feed Description: Thoughts on Software Development
I was recently looking over a codebase and noticed that several different files contained require statements. I'm not talking about the require statement that each test file has, I'm taking about seeing require 'ostruct', require 'enumerator' or require 'soap4r' in numerous class definitions.
For the last few projects I've been following the convention of putting all the require statements in environment.rb. There are more efficient strategies, but I find this to be the most maintainable of the solutions I've tried.
While following the above strategy I haven't run into any issues with two libraries defining behavior on differing classes that are named the same, but I have heard concerns from team members on the time it takes to require each library. I think that's a valid concern and I was planning on addressing it by writing a method that takes an array of strings and requires them one at a time. The new method would also benchmark each require and print a warning if the require is taking an unacceptable amount of time.
Please drop me a line (or blog it and leave a link) in the comments if you have a strategy that's worked well for you.
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