In my previous Advent article, I created higher-order promises and showed you how to use them. I didn't show you the magic of how they work. Now I'll develop another example but from the other direction.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, what are roles? Briefly stated, roles enable composing functionality (usually methods) into a class without without implying a change of inheritence. Said another way, roles let you specify what a class does without changing what it is. For a better description, check out Toby Inkster's article Horizontal Reuse: An Alternative to Inheritance.
An important utility of roles is that you can easily use more than one role at the same time in the same consuming class. With inheritance, especially of third-party functionality, you have to choose one set of extensions to utilize. This is because the author of the subclass establishes the inheritance. In roles, the user determines which roles to compose into the base class.
Yesterday I ended the discussion of Mojo::Base before discussing the roles support. Added in several installments between Mojolicious versions 7.40 and 7.55, this role support is one of the most recently added features in the ecosystem (along with promises, which will be covered in an upcoming article). The role handling comes from Role::Tiny which is an optional dependency in Mojolicious, but is required in order to use the functionality that I will describe.
Through this series, you've seen the module Mojo::Base referenced several times, though briefly and mostly in passing. It shouldn't be taken lightly however, it packs a lot of punch in one import statement! Nearly every file in the Mojolicious distribution uses it, either directly or indirectly. So what is it?
First it imports several handy pragma that make your code safer and some features that are useful. Second, it can be a base class to the current package, or establish a parent class, or even define a role. Let's see how it does it.