Awesome

Horcrux

A Horcrux is a powerful object in which a Dark wizard or witch has hidden a fragment of his or her soul for the purpose of attaining immortality.

The Horcrux ruby gem is an abstract key/value store adapter library. This is currently used at GitHub to load the activity feed from memcache or MySQL.

Horcrux adapters are shims around key/value systems. They need to define at least these three methods:

def get(key)
  client[key]
end

def set(key, value)
  client[key] = value
  true
end

def delete(key)
  client.delete(key) ? true : false
end

See Horcrux::Memory for a simple example.

They should also include the Horcrux::Methods module. If the underlying key/value system can perform some operations more efficiently, they can be overridden:

# using a redis client
def set_all(*keys)
  args = keys.to_a
  args.flatten!
  client.mset *args
  Array.new(keys.size, true) # redis set always succeeds
end

Adapters can also choose a Serializer object. A Serializer is any object that responds to #dump and #load. This means Marshal and Yajl can be passed in directly. Here's what a custom MessagePack serializer might look like:

module MessagePackSerializer
  def self.dump(value)
    value.to_msgpack
  end

  def self.load(str)
    MessagePack.unpack(str)
  end
end

You can then pass this in while creating your Horcrux adapter:

@adapter = Horcrux::Memory.new({}, MessagePackSerializer)

ToyStore Adapter

A lot of these ideas came from the Adapter gem. It ties into a rad Toystore ORM. Check them out... if they work for you, use them!

Horcrux differs in a few areas:

• Focus on batch get/set/delete operations.
• Doesn't mimic the Hash API.
• Serializers are a separate object. BYOS.
• Boring test/unit tests.
• Ruby 1.8.7 and Ruby 1.9.x compatibility.

Note on Patches/Pull Requests

1. Fork the project.
2. Make your feature addition or bug fix.
3. Add tests for it. This is important so I don't break it in a future version unintentionally.
4. Commit, do not mess with rakefile, version, or history. (if you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull)
5. Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.