NAME

Class::Inner - A perlish implementation of Java like inner classes

SYNOPSIS

    use Class::Inner;

    my $object = Class::Inner->new(
        parent => 'ParentClass',
        methods => { method => sub { ... } }, },
        constructor => 'new',
        args => [@constructor_args],
    );

DESCRIPTION

Yet another implementation of an anonymous class with per object overrideable methods, but with the added attraction of sort of working dispatch to the parent class's method.

METHODS

new HASH: Takes a hash like argument list with the following keys.

parent: The name of the parent class. Note that you can only get single inheritance with this or SUPER won't work.
methods: A hash, keys are method names, values are CODEREFs.
constructor: The name of the constructor method. Defaults to 'new'.
args: An anonymous array of arguments to pass to the constructor. Defaults to an empty list.

Returns an object in an 'anonymous' class which inherits from the parent class. This anonymous class has a couple of 'extra' methods:

SUPER

If you were to pass something like

    $obj = Class::Inner->new(
        parent  => 'Parent',
        methods => { method =>  sub { ...; $self->SUPER::method(@_) } },
    );

then "$self-"gt"SUPER::method" almost certainly wouldn't do what you expect, so we provide the "SUPER" method which dispatches to the parent implementation of the current method. There seems to be no good way of getting the full "SUPER::" functionality, but I'm working on it.

DESTROY

Because Class::Inner works by creating a whole new class name for your object, it could potentially leak memory if you create a lot of them. So we add a "DESTROY" method that removes the class from the symbol table once it's finished with.

If you need to override a parent's DESTROY method, adding a call to "Class::Inner::clean_symbol_table(ref $self)" to it. Do it at the end of the method or your other method calls won't work.

clean_symbol_table: The helper subroutine that DESTROY uses to remove the class from the symbol table.
new_classname: Returns a name for the next anonymous class.

AUTHOR

Maintained by Arun Prasaad "<arunbear@cpan.org>"

Thanks to the Iterative Software people: Leon Brocard, Natalie Ford and Dave Cross. Also, this module was written initially for use in the PerlUnit project, AKA Test::Unit. Kudos to Christian Lemburg and the rest of that team.

BUGS