SPUG: OO Perl conundrum

[Richard Anderson]

I recently loaded an upgrade to HTTP::WebTest to CPAN, and promptly got an
interesting change request from a gentleman named Thomas Ayles (actually, a
submittal of the code for a complete revision of the module).
(HTTP::WebTest is a module that fetched URLs, runs tests on the returned
page and generates a detailed test report.)

Thomas's idea, which is good, is to define a namespace,
HTTP::WebTest::Plugins, to hold plugin subroutines that run additional tests
on the page.  Then coderefs to the subroutines are passed to HTTP::WebTest,
which passed the fetched page to the subroutine for testing.  Thomas also
defines a class HTTP::WebTest::PluginHelper to encapsulate the report
generation.

My concern is about Thomas's use of the package and use statements.  The
structure of the new HTTP::WebTest class looks like this:

package HTTP::WebTest;
...
{
    package PluginHelper;
    ...
   package Plugins;
   use HTTP::WebTest;
   ...
}
 ...

This seems like a fairly non-standard use of OO Perl.  Would this be better
done by subclassing HTTP::WebTest and making PluginHelper and Plugins
subclasses of the new subclass be better? Or is there some simpler approach?

Puzzled,
Richard



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