Carl Youngblood wrote:

> I'm really interested in seeing Ruby on Rails.  As far as I can tell 
> it doesn't appear to be available yet.  Will it be available as a 
> standard ruby module, open source and everything?
>
> I've developed a similar MVC paradigm for my own web apps, but Ruby on 
> Rails seems like it is a little more polished.  I do have a couple of 
> questions.  Forgive me if the answers are obvious.  I consider myself 
> somewhat of a Ruby novice still.  I've written plenty of code in Ruby 
> but only in the conventional ways of the type that are explained in 
> say, Programming Ruby, not getting into more extravagant features like 
> using design patterns to change the actual OO features that is 
> available in the language.  So I was confused when I saw things in the 
> Rails model classes like belongs_to and has_many.  These look like new 
> language keywords.  How is this done?
>
I think it is described in the pickaxe but the idea is that since every 
class is a Class which is a Module you can add instance methods to 
Module and they can be accessed inside all class "scopes":

class Module
  def looks_like_keyword(*args)
    p args
  end
end

class MyClass
  looks_like_keyword "a", :a   # => ["a", :a]
end

Hope this helps,

/Robert