Rails Plugins: Extending Rails Beyond the Core

Chapter 6. Plugin Development

You now know the basic ingredients that make up a plugin, so it’s time to consider some of the more advanced ways to share functionality between Rails applications. This section discusses a number of common idioms and programming techniques that can help you write plugins.

Prelude: Mixing a Module’s Methods into a Class	63
Staring into the Heart of Ruby	67
Extracting Behavior into a Plugin	67
Writing an acts_as Plugin	73
Summary	82

It is worth noting (again) at the outset that the following techniques take advantage of some of the rich language features that Ruby provides. While you are going to learn the basic principles behind each technique, an in-depth understanding would require a book in its own right. Again, ...