I don’t pretend to be a huge fan of Ruby. That said, I can respect when a language has a feature that’s pretty damn neat and useful. For the uninformed, method_missing in Ruby is something like the following:
Obviously, this is a trick that should be used with caution. It can make for some unmaintainable code, as a class with many methods could get difficult to trace through and figure out just what the hell is happening. It can be put to good use, though – take an API wrapper, for instance. What’s it consist of? Generally, nothing more than the same function calls made over and over to various service endpoints.
Cool, let’s use this in Python!
I recently rewrote Twython to support OAuth authentication with Twitter (as of Twython 1.3). It ships with an example Django application to get people up and running quickly, and the adoption has been pretty awesome so far.
The funny thing about the Twython 1.3.0 release is that it was largely a rewrite of the entire library. It had become somewhat unwieldy, some odd two thousand lines of code with each API endpoint getting its own method definition. The only differing aspect of these calls is the endpoint URL itself. This is a perfect case for a method_missing setup – let’s catch the calls to non-existent methods, and grab them out of a dictionary mapping to every endpoint.
The source above is fairly well commented, but feel free to ask in the comments if you need further explanation. This resulted in a much more maintainable version of Twython – for each function that’s listed in a hash table, we can now just take any named parameter and url-encode/combine it. This makes Twython pretty API-change agnostic of the entire Twitter API. Pretty awesome sauce, no?