What's the preferred way to use helper methods in Ruby?
- by DR
Disclaimer: Although I'm asking in context of a Rails application, I'm not talking about Rails helpers (i.e. view helpers)
Let's say I have a helper method/function:
def dispatch_job(job = {})
#Do something
end
Now I want to use this from several places (mostly controllers, but also a few BackgrounDRb workers)
What's the preferred way to do this?
I can think of two possibilities:
1. Use a class and make the helper a static method:
class MyHelper
def self.dispatch_job(job = {})
end
end
class MyWorker
def run
MyHelper.dispatch_job(...)
end
end
2. Use a module and include the method into whatever class I need this functionality
module MyHelper
def self.dispatch_job(job = {})
end
end
class MyWorker
include MyHelper
def run
dispatch_job(...)
end
end
3. Other possibilities I don't know yet
...
The first one is more Java-like, but I'm not sure if the second one is really an appropriate use of Ruby's modules.
