I’ve been using Ruby full-time+ for the last few weeks, working on projects at work and then personal projects when I get home. There are a few things I’ve learned about Ruby that surprised me. Most of these were discovered when, going out on a limb, I tried something completely random to see if it worked–and it did!

On one of my projects, when initializing the application, I needed to be able to choose one class (we’ll call it FujiApple) if certain variable was set, and a different class (call it Gala) if it was not. So I tried the following:

if @certain_var.nil?
  AppleType = GalaApple
else
  AppleType = FujiApple
end

Now, keep in mind, AppleType is not a class that I have defined anywhere in my code, yet I could use it just the same as the class that I set it to!

What’s really going on here?

It took me a while to realize that I’m not actually creating a new class here (and hence the reason I put “classes” in quotes). What’s actually happening is that AppleType is just a plain old constant. However, because that constant is pointing to a class, you can use the same as if its own class.

If my FujiApple class looks like this:

class FujiApple
  def eat
    "NOM NOM NOM"
  end
end

I can do this:

> AppleType = FujiApple
  => FujiApple
> myApple = AppleType.new
  => #<FujiApple:0x1011b31c0>
> myApple.eat
  => "NOM NOM NOM"

Should I use it?

I’m not quite sure how good this practice actually is, because if we need to change the AppleType somewhere in the middle of the application run, then we are changing a constant, which is a no-no. However, if used properly, and only set during the initialization phase of the app (i.e. once), I believe it is a handy shortcut to having to check for the existence of that variable every time you want to use the class. Feel free to correct me on this. There is probably a better way to do it, such as using inheritance, but I found it fascinating that a solution like this would even work.