I’m serious about this. The splat is such a wildly devious little asterisk.

>> instruments = {'trombones' => 1, 'clarinets' => 2}       
>> p instruments.to_a
[["trombones", 1], ["clarinets", 2]]
>> p *instruments
["trombones", 1]
["clarinets", 2]

A 2-in-1 combo move! Look at that splat. It’s not just to_a. It called to_a and it siphoned the arguments.

So, Camping has an r method which is for making HTTP responses from scratch. The signature of this method is: r(status, body, headers = {}).

 r(404, 'Not Found', 'X-Powered-By' => 'Camping')

And it has controller objects (descended from Camping::Base) which you run into sometimes. These objects have @status, @headers and @body ivars inside them.

 class Camping::Base
   def to_a
     [@status, @body, @headers]
   end
 end

With the above to_a method, I can now do:

 r(*controller)

Which can be used as a syntax for forwarding HTTP requests.

See, Camping has a technique for making requests inside itself. For example, let’s say we’ve got a Search controller that takes a q variable with search terms in it. And, let’s say we want the front page (the Index controller) to show the results page for a search containing the word “clarinet.”

 class Index < R '/'
   def get
     r *AppName.post(:Search, :env => @env, :input => {:q => "clarinet"})
   end
 end

The splat is Ruby’s pipe for arrays. Put that in your pipe and splat it!