Hi,

I'm new to Ruby, so I'm still learning the Ruby Way.  I'm also reading
Martin Fowler's 'Refactoring' at the moment and have realised that some
of the classes I've created in a program I'm writing fit his description
of value objects that should be refactored into reference objects.
Those classes are, in fact, wrappers over entities in a DB so I need a
factory (creation) method to always return the same object when given
the same creation parameter.  E.g.:

Section.getSection(10) always returns the same object representing the
record in the DB with primary key '10'.

Since I can't make Section's constructor private in Ruby I wonder how
should I refactor my class into a reference object class?  Indeed,
should I do this or does the Ruby Way use some other method?

Cheers,

Richard.