RailsConf 2007 Keynote: A peek at Rails 2.0

Posted by Enrique Delgado Fri, 18 May 2007 22:03:00 GMT

RailsConf 2007 is well underway now. After a day of tutorials, we were welcomed by Chad Fowler, writer and fellow Pragmtic Studio Alumni. Chad had some cool things to say to the community, namely that we have an opportunity to have a good impact and he encouraged us and everyone to raise money for charity as a Rails community. Go to http://pragmaticstudio.com/donate to make your donation.

David Heinemeier Hansson kicked-off the conference with his keynote speech “A peek at Rails 2.0”. David spoke about some of the upcoming features in 2.0, but specifically said that 2.0 is not going to be a “magic unicorn”. I.e. not a re-write, but more like a progression of sorts; real and humble. I’m sure the screencast will g up soon at the rails site site.

Some of the features are:

  1. namespaces in routes.
  2. Default scaffold, will have a complete xml backend.
  3. scaffold_resource will be just scaffold and it will be RESTful
  4. Easy to connect to a REST interface, even with an isolated simple ruby file. “This stuff works now”. Active Web Service no longer bundled with 2.0, just Active Resource. “The answer is not SOAP, it’s active resource”
  5. Breakpoints are back. Rails-debugger.
  6. Debugger
  7. HTTP performance though JS and CSS cache to make the browser make fewer connections also, asset hosts. Query cache.
  8. Sexy migrations
  9. The MIT license assumption.
  10. Spring cleaning (all those deprecation warnings will become a reality)

More soon!

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Gearing up for RailsConf 2007 in Portland!

Posted by Enrique Delgado Sun, 13 May 2007 17:30:00 GMT

With only three days to go, I’ve been busy getting everything in place for my trip to Portland.

I spent some time reading through all the descriptions and presenter bios for each of the sessions in the conference. I’m excited to hear from some big names like Dan Webb, Geoffrey Grosenbach, Amy Hoy amongst others.

A buddy of mine pointed me to this conference-planning site. It’s pretty cool; this is my preliminary plan.

Keep an eye on my Flickr photostream for pictures of the conference :)

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SliceHost + Deprec Plug-in

Posted by Enrique Delgado Tue, 01 May 2007 15:00:00 GMT

I’ve recently purchased a slice at SliceHost and started to use the Deprec plug-in for Rails for my apps.

Thanks to the awesome Top Funky free peepcode screencast I was able to start deploying applications (including the entire Rails stack) quickly and in a predictable manner.

Check out the screencast for details, but this is my basic recipe to setup a new application. These steps will create a sample rails application, setup apache, mongrel, and deploy (with migrations!):

  1. rails mykillerapp
  2. deprec --apply-to .
  3. Edit your config/deploy.rb file.
  4. cap deprec_setup
  5. cap setup_scm
  6. cap deploy_with migrations
  7. cap restart_apache

And you are done! Subsequent releases are even easier:

  1. cap deploy_with_migrations

Pretty good eh?

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Interactive Ruby Console Tip: Remember the last X commands

Posted by Enrique Delgado Wed, 25 Apr 2007 15:47:00 GMT

This is an excellent tip by Mike Clark to make IRB remember the last X number of commands even after you exit and restart IRB.

This is great when developing and after modifying a model, you don’t have to re-type everyting once again :)

“Simply add the code below to your ~/.irbrc file. Then you can use up-arrow to cycle through the history, even after restarting IRB. It relies on the built-in history of readline, so you’ll need readline installed. The code below also enables completion using the TAB key”

IRB.conf[:PROMPT_MODE] = :SIMPLE

require 'irb/completion'

IRB.conf[:AUTO_INDENT] = true

# Session History

HISTFILE = "~/.irb.hist" unless defined? HISTFILE
MAXHISTSIZE = 100 unless defined? MAXHISTSIZE

begin
if defined? Readline::HISTORY
histfile = File::expand_path(HISTFILE)
if File::exists?(histfile)
lines = IO::readlines(histfile).collect { |line| line.chomp }
Readline::HISTORY.push(*lines)
end

Kernel::at_exit {
lines = Readline::HISTORY.to_a.reverse.uniq.reverse
lines = lines[-MAXHISTSIZE, MAXHISTSIZE] if lines.nitems >
MAXHISTSIZE
File::open(histfile, File::WRONLY|File::CREAT|File::TRUNC) {|f|
lines.each {|line| f.puts line }
}
}
end
end

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