Hopper

Hopper (noun): A storage container used to collect granular materials designed to easily dispense these materials through the use of gravity. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopper)

Hopper accumulates items and executes a block of code when its capacity is reached, or the timeout is reached, whichever event occurs first.

Hopper is useful for collecting a certain number of items before processing them, whilst not blocking too long if the capacity is not reached.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'hopper'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install hopper

Usage

Create a hopper:

h = Hopper.new capacity: 28, timeout: 1 do |items, timed_out|
  puts "I have #{items.size} items"
  puts "I timed out" if timed_out
end

Add items to the hopper:

h << 'an item'

To run the block even when there are no items present:

h = Hopper.new capacity: 28, timeout: 1 do |items, timed_out|
  puts "I have #{items.size} items"
  puts "I timed out" if timed_out
end

To stop the hopper:

h.stop

Hopper raises an exception if an item is added to the hopper while its not running.

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request