ramblings of a hikikomori - Rails, Firefox, Anime, Mac
Living on the Edge (of Rails) in FrenchMay 1st, 2008
It looks like Cyril Mougel has translated my 2 latest posts to French: LotE #17 and #18. Thanks Cyril!
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Comments and TrackBacks (1) | Category: Edge Rails, Ruby, Ruby on Rails Living on the edge (of Rails) #18April 27th, 2008
This week’s report covers changes from 21 Apr 2008 to 27 Apr 2008 (the day the corresponding Rails Envy podcast was recorded).
Not much interesting to report this week - there were mostly a bunch of bugfixes and Ruby 1.8.7-compatibility commits.
These are 2 changes that I’d talked about earlier this week so I won’t repeat myself - take a read through ActiveResource timeouts and why it matters.
The MySQL adapter in Rails now maps the integer column type in your migrations to either smallint, int, or bigint depending on the :limit option.
This means that a migration like this:
def self.up
create_table :searches do |t|
t.integer :foo, :limit => 2
endwill create your foo column as a smallint(2) MySQL datatype (instead of int(2) before). (More information MySQL numeric datatypes.)
Credit goes to DHH for this patch.
Related changeset: http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/a37546517dad9f6d9a7de6e1dba4d960909d71e8
As always, let me know of any suggestions or how I can improve the Living on the Edge (of Rails) series.
Permalink | Comments and TrackBacks (2) | Category: Edge Rails, Open Source, Ruby, Ruby on Rails Living on the edge (of Rails) #17April 20th, 2008
Not much going on this week on edge Rails. It does seem however that we do have a new Rails core member, Joshua Peek. Also, the new Rails’ bug tracker hosted on Lighthouse is ready for use, so be sure to submit your patches and bug reports there.
This week’s report covers changes from 14 Apr 2008 to 20 Apr 2008 (the day the corresponding Rails Envy podcast was recorded).
The caches_page now takes an :if option for specifying when a page can actually be cached via a Proc. You can now do this, for example:
caches_page :index, :if => Proc.new { |c| !c.request.format.json? }That will only cache your index page if the requested format is not JSON.
Credit goes to Paul Horsfall for this enhancement.
Related changeset: http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/14a40804a29a57ad05ca6bffbe1e5334089593a9
Remember how you can now use specialized TestCase classes for testing controllers and ActionMailer classes? Now you can do the same with your Rails view helpers with the new ActionView::TestCase class.
Here’s a quick example:
module PeopleHelper
def title(text)
content_tag(:h1, text)
end
def homepage_path
people_path
end
end
class PeopleHelperTest < ActionView::TestCase
def setup
ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map|
map.people 'people', :controller => 'people', :action => 'index'
map.connect ':controller/:action/:id'
end
end
def test_title
assert_equal "<h1>Ruby on Rails</h1>", title("Ruby on Rails")
end
def test_homepage_path
assert_equal "/people", homepage_path
endCredit goes to Josh Peek for this sweet little enhancement.
Even though Memcache-client was added to ActiveSupport recently, it didn’t allow you to specify any configuration options beyond just the IP of the memcached server. Now you can pass along more configuration options like so:
config.action_controller.fragment_cache_store = :mem_cache_store, 'localhost', { :compression => true, :debug => true, :namespace => 'foo' }This patch is courtesy of Jonathan Weiss.
Related changeset: http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/9e1d506a8cfedef2fdd605e4cbf4bf53651ad214
As always, let me know of any suggestions or how I can improve the Living on the Edge (of Rails) series.
Permalink | Comments and TrackBacks (3) | Category: Edge Rails, Open Source, Ruby, Ruby on Rails Living on the edge (of Rails) #16 - Github editionApril 13th, 2008
A slight change this week since Rails has moved to Git - all changesets are now referenced to Github.
This week’s report covers changes from 7 Apr 2008 to 13 Apr 2008 (the day the corresponding Rails Envy podcast was recorded).
A helpers method has been introduced to ActionController - you can now access your helpers like so:
ApplicationController.helpers.simple_format(text)Credit goes to 19 year old Josh Peek, one of the more prolific Rails contributors (and most likely to join Pratik in Rails Core imo).
Related changeset: http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/917423d664038d6791738a73ad1446437dbb71df
A json_escape (aliased as j, similar to how html_escape is aliased as h) has been introduced by Rick Olson for escaping HTML entities in JSON strings. This is useful if you find yourself emitting JSON strings in HTML pages (e.g. for documenting a JSON API):
json_escape("is a > 0 & a < 10?")
# => is a \u003E 0 \u0026 a \u003C 10?Of course, since json_escape is aliased as j, you can do this in your ERB templates:
<%=j @person.to_json %>Related changeset: http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/0ff7a2d89fc95dcb0a32ed92aab7156b0778a7ea
Rails will now accept POSTed JSON content! For example, you can now send a POST to “/posts” of your Post resource like this:
POST /posts
{"post": {"title": "Breaking News"}}And your create action will automatically parse the POSTed JSON into the request params so that this code below just works:
def create
@post = Post.create params[:post]
endCredit goes to Rick Olson.
Related changeset: http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/4d594cffcfc93b37fad4e423ec8593299e50133c
A new schema_migrations table for storing which migrations have been run has been introduced, and this replaces the existing schema_info table (which simply keeps track of the last applied schema version). This change makes it possible to add migrations (for example, after you’ve merged from someone’s branch) - when you migrate your database via rake db:migrate, those never-applied “interleaved” migrations will be run. Similarly, when migrating down schema versions, never-applied “interleaved” will be skipped.
See http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/11493 for more information.
This useful patch is the brainchild of Jordi Bunster (WWR profile). I’m sure many Rails developers who branch extensively will thank Jordi for this excellent patch!
Related changeset: http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/8a5a9dcbf64843f064b6e8a0b9c6eea8f0b8536e
Remember how you can now run the gems:unpack Rake task to unpack a gem into your vendor/gems/ directory (this was mentioned in an earlier Living on the Edge)?
David Dollar (Github profile) has firmed up that patch quite a bit by adding the gems:unpack:dependencies Rake task that unpacks the dependencies of the gems as well. So running:
gems:unpack:dependencies GEM=activecouchwould unpack the full Rubygem dependency tree of gems that the activecouch gem depends upon.
Related changeset: http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/4364c361b599f99bc2345ce4eb2d145b07ed8a0f
As always, let me know of any suggestions or how I can improve the Living on the Edge (of Rails) series! Now go out there and start forking Rails!
Permalink | Comments and TrackBacks (1) | Category: Edge Rails, Open Source, Ruby, Ruby on Rails Living on the edge (of Rails) #15 - the early editionApril 6th, 2008
I’m gonna post up the Living on the Edge a little earlier this week because I’ve found I just can’t keep up (when things get busy) with 2 separate sets of notes for the Rails Envy podcast and another for my own blog posts.
From this week onwards, I’ll be following Pratik’s suggestion to post about changes as they happen instead of after an entire week so expect a slight change in the format of Living on the edge for next week!
This week’s report covers changes from 31 Mar 2008 to 6 Apr 2008 (the day the corresponding Rails Envy podcast was recorded).
This has been a long time coming: You can now use Rails.env instead of RAILS_ENV, Rails.root instead of RAILS_ROOT, Rails.logger instead of RAILS_DEFAULT_LOGGER, and Rails.cache instead of RAILS_CACHE. Not having to use constants is nice because it always felt a bit dirty to have so many hard-coded constants in the Rails namespace.
Credit goes to Pratik Naik, the newest Rails core team member for this cleanup.
Related changeset: http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/9180
You can now use render :partial to render a collection of different elements and Rails will figure out which partial template to use. For example:
render :partial => [ monkey, donkey, dramatic_chipmunk ]will render the monkey with the ‘monkeys/_monkey.html.erb’ partial, donkey with the ‘donkeys/_donkey.html.erb’ partial, and last but definitely not lest, dramatic_gopher with the ‘dramatic_chipmunks/_dramatic_chipmunk.html.erb’ partial
This is especially useful if when using STI, where your ActiveRecord model would return objects of different types. The collection [ monkey, donkey, dramatic_chipmunk ] could very well be something returned from your Animal model that has subclasses of Monkey, Donkey and DramaticChipmunk via STI.
Credit: Zach Dennis of ar-extensions fame.
Related changeset: http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/9177
It seems like work on ActiveModel (think unified ActiveRecord and ActiveResource behaviors) has been revived, if the latest commits (http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/9171 and http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/9173) by David (DHH) is anything to go by.
You could do this before:
firm = Firm.find(:first)
firm.account = Account.new # Associate INVALID account
firm.save # This doesn't failNow that’s fixed thanks to Pratik Naik.
Related changeset: http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/9232
As usual, any feedback is respectfully appreciated!
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