I am working on a big project, and I realized that several of the components were groups of classes that I could turn into services and strip from Rails. But now that I've done that I realize that the slowness of loading classes without Spork isn't a function of Rails being slow, but a function of Ruby being slow. Is there something like Spork that will work in non Rails projects?
Spork should work just fine for any ruby project, it just requires a bit more setup.
Assuming you're using rspec 2.x and spork 0.9, make a spec_helper.rb that looks something like:
require 'spork'
# the rspec require seems to be necessary,
# without it you get "Missing or uninitialized constant: Object::RSpec" errors
require 'rspec'
Spork.prefork do
# do expensive one-time setup here
require 'mylibrary'
MyLibrary.setup_lots_of_stuff
end
Spork.each_run do
# do setup that must be done on each test run here (setting up external state, etc):
MyLibrary.reset_db
end
Everything in the Spork.prefork block will only be run once (at spork startup), the rest will run on every test invocation.
If you have lots of framework-specific setup, you'd probably be better off making an AppFramework for your library. See the padrino AppFramework for an example.