ToadSpawn

A basic persistent hash. Behaves similar to a normal hash but the key value pairs persist between instantiations. The keys must be symbols and only strings, floats and fixnums can be stored as their original types, anything else is converted to a string. A simple file based store is used under the hood.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'toad_spawn'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install toad_spawn

Usage

Say you want a simple key/value based persistent data store:

whatever = ToadSpawn::Base.new('/path/folder/A')

The path argument must be an existing, writable folder and gives the ToadSpawn it's uniqueness. If you instantiate ToadSpawn with this path anywhere again, it will have the same data.

So later, or in another program:

data = ToadSpawn::Base.new('/path/folder/A') 

data[:string] = 'ant'
data[:float]  = 1.2345
data[:fixnum] = 1001

data[:string] # => 'ant'
data[:float]  # => 1.2345
data[:fixnum] # => 1001

another_spawn = ToadSpawn::Base.new('/path/folder/B')
another_spawn.size  # => 0

These methods work just like in Hash:

data.to_hash          # => {:string => 'ant', :float => 1.2345, :fixnum => 1001}
data.empty?           # => false
data.any?             # => true
data.has_key?(:float) # => true
data.has_value?(100)  # => false
data.keys             # => [:string, :float, :fixnum]
data.values           # => ['ant', 1.2345, 1001]
data.size             # => 3
data.delete(:float)   # => deletes the value and returns it: 1.2345
data.clear            # => clears the ToadSpawn and returns {}

Don't forget to flush!

Because ToadSpawn uses caching under the hood to improve performance, please be aware that it is not automatically mutiprocess safe - meaning that if a spawn is instantiated and another process opens the same spawn and changes an element, that change will not be seen by the original spawn - until it is re-instantiated or the flush method is called to re-read the filesystem.

Contributing

  1. Fork it
  2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
  3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
  4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
  5. Create new Pull Request