Meta Bates

Thanks to the cold and snowy New England winter this year, I’ve been able to devote quite a bit of time to getting Mack to run on Ruby 1.9, so with that said, here’s the 0.8.3 release of Mack, featuring… TADA… Ruby 1.9!! Of course there are a few other features and improvements in this release. Here’s a quick run down:

Ruby 1.9

The big one. Mack runs very well on Ruby 1.9, unfortunately I can’t say the same thing about some other frameworks. I’ve had some run ins with DataMapper on 1.9, but I’m sure those will be ironed out shortly.

A few weeks ago I announced I was working on getting Ruby 1.9 support for all my gems and libraries. I started out with Configatron, then upgraded Cachetastic and Genosaurus. Now Mack is 1.9 compatible. When I made the announcement the guys at RailsEnvy picked up on it and said that I made a call to arms to the community to pick up 1.9 support. Now granted, I didn’t actually say those words, but I think the intent was there, so I’m going to now officially say those words. This is a ‘call to arms’ to the Ruby community to upgrade their gems, plugins, libraries, frameworks, etc… to work on Ruby 1.9. I’ve done it, and I can tell you, it’s not that tough. Just use multiruby, and you’re off and running.

ActiveSupport In, Facets Out

What with the world getting smaller these days, well, at least the world of Ruby web frameworks. A lot of great work is going into refactoring ActiveSupport and making it faster, better, and smaller. Because of that and the fact that every time a new release of Facets comes out it breaks a whole lot of stuff, I’ve decided to use ActiveSupport as the basis of the mack-facets gem. So basically mack-facets is just ActiveSupport with a few more enhancements.

JavaScript Effects

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Gerardo Pis-Lopez, mack-javascript, has been upgraded to add helpers methods for effects for both Prototype/Scriptaculous and jQuery. Thank you to Gerardo for the much needed upgraded to mack-javascript.

Upgrades

Mack has been upgraded to use Rack 0.9.1, DataMapper 0.9.9, and a few other smaller gems.

Changelog:

• [#243] Upgraded to Rack 0.9.1
• [#242] Upgraded to DataMapper 0.9.9
• [#241] Removed dependency on Facets
• [#239] Add do_sqlite3 to gems.rb
• [#166] Effects for mack-javascript
• [#133] Added Form Builders
• [#22] Ruby 1.9 Support
• gem: rack 0.9.1
• gem: rspec 1.1.12
• gem: configatron 2.2.2
• gem: cachetastic 2.1.2
• gem: data_mapper 0.9.9
• gem: addressable 2.0.1
• gem: extlib 0.9.9

Happy New Year everyone!

With the help of the absolutely amazing multiruby library and an edge version of rspec from GitHub, the latest version of Configatron now supports JRuby 1.1.6 and Ruby 1.9.1rc1. There are no other functional changes to the library, so it’s a full drop in replacement for vesion 2.1.6.

I highly encourage everyone to checkout multiruby and start upgrading their libraries so we can all move to 1.9 quicker, which means more speed and more power. Once we’re all in 1.9 land we can really make use of some of the amazing features it provides.

Anyway, I’ll be working on upgrading all my libraries and applications to work on 1.8 and 1.9, and hopefully JRuby, over the next couple of months. So be on the look out for a new versions of Cachetastic, Genosaurus [update: Genosaurus already works with 1.9 and JRuby. Hoorah!], and, of course, Mack.

Hey there folks, sorry for the long wait for this release, but it’s here. It’s been a long November for yours truly. I’ve had to find a new job. I’ve had pneumonia. We, at least in America, have celebrated Thanksgiving. And, of course, who can forget RubyConf 2008?

So with that said, what’s in 0.8.2? Honestly, not a whole lot. There are a couple of bug fixes, a button_to_remote (think submit_to_remote in Rails) helper, and deferred routes. More on deferred routes in a moment, as it’s actually a pretty cool feature that only Mack and Merb share. And finally there is bundled gems.

Bundled Gems

What do I mean I say ‘bundled gems’? Well, because of the rather large number of gems that get installed with Mack, and because of some gem version dependency issues, Mack is now bundling it’s third party dependency gems inside itself. For example, mack-facets used to rely on the gems ‘facets’ and ‘english’. Those gems are now bundled inside the mack-facets gem and now longer need to be downloaded and installed by end users. This should make installing Mack super easy. It should also make dealing with having multiple versions of Mack installed on your system easier to deal with and maintain.

Deferred? Routes

So what are deferred routes? Ezra wrote a really great write up back in April. The idea is simple, with newer web servers such as Thin and Ebb, you can tell them to spawn a new thread to handle particular requests, such as long running processes like file uploads. This can really help speed things up as server can process regular requests using an event machine model, which is very fast, but can be really slow and block the server for longer processes. Now those processes can spawn into their own threads and not block the server.

In Mack 0.8.2 you can mark your routes with a deferred? => true option which will trigger this behavior. It’s much more advanced than the similar feature that can be found in Merb, which requires a separate configuration for your deferred actions, and the urls have to be ‘hard coded’. Mack let’s you use all the dynamic power of your routes, like you would want to. It’s just another option on the route itself. For a great tutorial on using deferred routes, check out the following page on www.mackery.com:

http://www.mackery.com/routing/deferred_routes

Upgraded Dependencies

A few gems have been upgraded as part of this release, the big ones include DataMapper to 0.9.7, ActiveRecord to 2.2.2, and Haml to 2.0.4.

Changelog:

• [#237] Fixed render :rjs throws errors
• [#236] Upgraded to ActiveRecord 2.2.2
• [#235] Upgraded to DataMapper 0.9.7
• [#230] Upgraded to facets 2.4.5
• [#229] Upgraded to english 0.3.1
• [#227] Removed WEBrick logging
• [#226] Bundled gems.
• [#225] Removed dependency on Thin
• [#223] Fixed mackery console fails
• [#148] Added button_to_remote helper method.
• [#16] Added deferred? routes.
• gem: active_record 2.2.2
• gem: data_mapper 0.9.7
• gem: addressable 2.0.0
• gem: facets 2.4.5
• gem: english 0.3.1
• gem: rspec 1.1.11
• gem: haml 2.0.4

Thanks to Matthew A. Brown for his contribution to the Configatron library. He added the ability to ‘lock’ down a namespace. Configatron has had a protect method for a while, but that only locks down a specific configuration. With lock you can lock down the whole namespace and prevent everything in that namespace from being altered. Maybe some code will help you understand:

When you get a chance checkout Mat’s Github page, http://github.com/outoftime. Thank you very much Mat for your contribution.

I know with each release I say how excited I am by this release, but that’s usually because with each release there’s some great new feature that makes me either proud to have developed it, or to proud to be associated with it. Mack 0.8.1 is definitely no exception.

Before I get into what has to be my favorite feature since the distributed features of 0.7.0, and quite possibly my favorite feature in Mack today, let’s talk about a few of the other features in this release.

More Routing Enhancements

There are a few great new features in the routing system in this release. The first off is a real crowd favorite, Nested Resources. Just like Rails you can now nest resources in Mack.

http://www.mackery.com/routing/nested_resources

In Mack 0.8.0 we introduced the ability to put host information in the routes file. This would be used to match the host when matching a route as well as building the url for that route when using the url helpers. This made dealing with subdomains very easier. Well, to really give everyone that subdomain fu everybody loves, we’ve added the ability to put embedded parameters in the host parameter in routes. It’s pretty dang cool, let me tell you. Checkout these examples:

http://www.mackery.com/routing/misc

Pagination API

There is now a pagination API that’s part of the mack-orm API. The first implementation of this in the mack-data_mapper package. At its heart it’s extremely easily to implement for new ORMs, one method, and using it is just as easy. There will be a write up on using the API in the forth coming days.

Jabber Support

The mack-notifier package can now send notifications using the Jabber protocol.

!!Portlets!!

Portlets are what components in Rails should’ve been and they’re what slices in Merb should be. Portlets are a way off packaging a full Mack application into a Ruby Gem so they can easily be shared and used in other Mack applications. As you’re about to see, this simple page is all the information you need to know about developing, testing, packaging, and using Portlets.

Portlets encapsulate a whole Mack application, from controllers to views to models to configuration settings to your images, stylesheets and javascripts. This makes it possible to develop extremely rich applications and share them with other Mack applications.

http://www.mackery.com/portlets/developing
http://www.mackery.com/portlets/testing
http://www.mackery.com/portlets/packaging
http://www.mackery.com/portlets/using

Bug Fixes and Minor Feature Updates

As always there are great bug fixes and feature updates. Below is the changelog that outlines those improvements.

Changelog:

• [#217] Fixed rake mack:dump:routes throws errors
• [#216] Added ability to turn off view caching in distributed app
• [#215] Asset path lookup flow update
• [#213] Fixed the params method should be case insensitive
• [#211] Added a pagination API to mack-data_mapper
• [#210] Added a pagination API to mack-orm
• [#209] inline form built by link_to should include authenticity token
• [#208] Added support for DataMapper repository context per request
• [#207] Fixed session cookie not being deleted properly
• [#206] Portlet now have access to its base_path
• [#205] Fixed testing of nested parameters and file uploads breaks
• [#204] Resource routes can now take options when being defined.
• [#203] Updated distributed: view_cache to include Mack::ViewHelpers instead of Mack::ViewHelpers::LinkHelpers
• [#200] INCOMPATIBILITY NOTICE: mack-notifier configatron namespaces have changed from *_settings to * (e.g. smtp_settings to smtp)
• [#198] Added Embedded parameters in ‘host’ for Routes
• [#196] Extlib 0.9.8 support
• [#195] DataMapper 0.9.6 support
• [#193] Portlet Support
• [#192] mack-localization now supports portlet
• [#191] Asset-Packager support for Portlet
• [#143] Nested resources in Routes
• [#134] Form elements are now ‘errorfied’.
• [#131] Date/Time select boxes can now be easily re-arranged.
• [#78] Jabber support
• gem: configatron 2.1.5
• gem: extlib 0.9.8