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A namespace can be thought of as a container for other items. These things can be classes, constants, other modules, and more.
Code Samples
Multiple levels of modules can be used to namespace items:
module LaserBots
module Console
class Command
end
end
module World
class Player
attr_reader :name
def initialize(name)
@name = name
end
end
end
end
The classes, modules, and constants can then be accessed by using the constant resolution operator (::) to get to nested namespaces:
player = LaserBots::World::Player.new("Jason")
puts player.name
Now, we're going to talk about namespaces. 0:00 A namespace can be thought of as a container for other items. 0:03 These things can be classes, constants, other modules and more. 0:08 The value in namespacing comes from having potential conflicts of names in our code. 0:13 As an example, let's say that we were writing a text based game. 0:19 The game has a couple of different concepts of commands 0:24 that are both completely separate. 0:27 When we start the game from our command prompt, 0:30 we can add a flag to change certain options for gameplay or set our name. 0:32 Similarly, our player can command other characters. 0:37 Let's see how namespaces work now using workspaces. 0:41 So now, let's take a little bit of a look at namespacing. 0:45 Right here, we've got this laser_bots.rb file. 0:49 This is eventually going to be a game about lasers and robots. 0:54 For right now, we have this class that represents a player and 1:00 the player just has a name attribute. 1:04 So we initialize the player to a new player variable, and 1:07 then write the player's name to the screen. 1:11 Now let's just go ahead and run that, and watch it work. 1:15 So I'm just going to run ruby laser_bots.rb, and 1:18 you can see it prints out the player's name. 1:22 Now if we wanna namespace this, we can do that by surrounding this with a module. 1:26 So let's go ahead and call this module, 1:34 LaserBots and we can indent everything here. 1:36 And now, this player class lives inside of the Laserbots module. 1:46 So let's run this again and it's gonna fail this time. 1:54 And we can see it says uninitialized constant player 1:57 and why does it say that, we clearly have a player class here. 2:03 But the thing is, it lives inside of the laser bot's module. 2:08 So we need to tell ruby where the player class is now and 2:12 we do that by typing the module that it's in first. 2:18 We access it just like a constant, which we saw in the last video. 2:24 So now we have this player object, and Ruby knows to look for 2:30 it inside of this LaserBots module. 2:33 So if we were to run this again, we can see that that works now. 2:37 Now one thing that's interesting is, we do not have to 2:43 specify the constant resolution operator if we're inside of a module. 2:47 So let's say we had a class called robot and 2:54 the robot class was inside of the LaserBots module, 2:58 we'll say robots have a name also, 3:02 it's pretty much the same as a player class but it can also target a player. 3:08 In that case, we could call something like Player.new and 3:20 let's just call this name here. 3:27 In this case, if we are in the same level of the module hierarchy, 3:31 we don't have to specify that constant resolution operator. 3:35 And in the same way, if we really wanted to, 3:42 we could have multiple levels of name spaces. 3:45 So for example, let's say we had 3:50 a console module inside here and that dealt with 3:54 writing things to the screen that could have a command class inside of it. 3:59 And then the same thing if we wanted to have things that actually dealt 4:05 with the game world, we could have a module called world and 4:10 that would be where we could put 4:16 the Player and Robot classes. 4:20 And now if we were to run this it would error out and let's just go ahead and 4:35 do that again and watch it fail. 4:39 Again, we can't find the constant LaserBots player, 4:41 in that case we need to change this to LaserBots::World::Player. 4:46 And that will access the class inside of this module. 4:51
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