Any guides on when and when not to use STI and inheritance in ruby projects?
I used to use inheritance tons in the Java world, but I find I tend to only use modules in ruby.
I’m thinking that I should be using inheritance more so that my code does more tell rather than ask…and thus has less conditionals.
And should a class broken up into 2 small classes with a small base class stay in one ruby file, or break up into 3 files?
I would consider using STI when the state of the models involved is identical but the behavior is not. STI is not a great fit when you start to add columns hat apply only to a subset of the models involved.
To be clear, both included modules and superclasses are forms of inheritance. Neither are a “tell, don’t ask” silver bullet.
When at all possible, I would advise you to favor composition over inheritance. See also the notes on our recent dev discussion at thoughtbot.
I keep just about all classes in their own files.