This Week in Edge Rails

Posted by Mike Gunderloy November 14, 2008 @ 03:29 PM

The important news in edge Rails this week is the imminent release of Rails 2.2.1 – otherwise known as Rails 2.2 RC2. Getting ready for this release did lead to some significant changes in the Rails codebase.

First, it’s very likely that you’ll need to upgrade rubygems to run RC2: the required version of rubygems is now 1.3.1, which was just released yesterday. This dependency is part of the continued work to make vendored gems useful and stable. You may find that updating rubygems is less than smooth, depending on your current version; check out this article if you have any trouble. commit

The Rails routing engine has seen some serious work over the past week as well. For starters, Jeremy Kemper committed several fixes to the core routing engine that cut down on object creation and RegExp creation, trimming memory use. commit commit There are also new :only and :except options for map.resources, which can help cut down memory use if you have a lot of resource routes – see these articles for details (though there have been some tweaks in the way nested limited routes work after those were written). commit commit commit

The new ActiveRecord connection pooling code has seen some tuning as well, making it more efficient in development model and avoiding some issues with the Oracle adapter. commit

Polymorphic URLs now behave more intuitively if one of their parameters is nil. For example, a call to polymorphic_path([@project, @filter, @issue]) with a nil filter now returns project_issue_url instead of a NoMethodError. commit

The request forgery protection feature in Rails has been tightened up so that it only applies to HTML-formatted content requests. There is substantial discussion on the Lighthouse ticket that led to this change, but the bottom line is that the old implementation had some bugs, notably making destroy actions inaccessible via XML. Other types of requests are protected by other means – for instance, the same origin policy on AJAX requests substitutes for request forgery protection there. commit

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This Week in Edge Rails

Posted by Mike Gunderloy November 07, 2008 @ 01:22 PM

Rails, as you probably know, is under active development. So, for those of you who don’t have time to read every commit to the source, we’ve decided to revive this section of the weblog. This time around, I’m covering 3 weeks of commits: the time since Rails 2.2 RC1 (otherwise known as Rails 2.2.0) was released. Though there aren’t any major new features being added as Rails drives towards the 2.2 release, that doesn’t mean the source has been completely quiet: there have been about 75 commits in that three-week period. Here’s a look at some of those changes.

In the run-up to 2.2, we’re seeing a batch of little bug fixes, as people try to ensure quality in the release. These include:

• Squashing a binary data corruption bug that surfaced in the PostgreSQL adapter. commit
• The regex behind redirect_to can now accept a wider variety of URL schemes, making it possible to redirect to some destinations that were previously inaccessible. commit
• A regression in date_select and datetime_select that could raise a Null Pointer Exception under some circumstances has been fixed. commit
• The sanitize helper has been fixed to avoid double escaping already properly escaped entities. commit
• FormTagHelper has been stopped from generating illegal HTML if the name contains square brackets. commit
• A memory leak was squashed in Active Record scoped methods. commit

Some of the major features for 2.2 have been getting fine-tuned as well. There’s been work to clean up some loose ends in the thread safety department, and changes to make the I18n backend reload its translations in development mode. The included Prototype bits were bumped to the latest 1.6.0.3 release. The code for configuring, loading, and vendoring gems has had some attention, and the code for maintaining database connection pools has come in for some fine-tuning as well.

Just because we’re in feature freeze doesn’t mean that a few new features can’t sneak in:

• The current_page method is a bit more reliable now in that it ignores options you don’t explicitly supply (making it more friendly to URLs that use the query string for pagination and the like). commit
• The default logging has been cleaned up to be less chatty: you’ll see fewer duplicate log messages as Rails goes about its business. commit
• The render method now takes a :js option to allow you to directly render inline JavaScript without using RJS. commit
• If you’ve got a current (Ruby 1.8.7 or greater) version of Ruby, Action Mailer turns on STARTTLS if the server supports it; this makes Action Mailer compatible with GMail without the need for plugins. commit

One final note: I’m deliberately not trying to cover every single commit here; just those ones that struck me as most interesting. But if I left out something that you think is highly significant, feel free to add a pointer in the comments!

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Hackfest

Posted by pratik August 06, 2008 @ 12:49 PM

And once again, hackfest is back. Only this time, it’s better than ever, thanks to Git

The idea is quite simple. You get 5000 points for each of your patches that get merged to the core. The person with the highest points at the end of the month wins.

August hackfest is already on and almost 3 more weeks to go, so hack on for the first prize – a free pass to RailsConf Europe ( special thanks goes to O’Reilly for the prize )

If you’ve never contributed to Rails before, now is a good time. This railscast is a nice head start.

Thanks to all those who have contributed to Rails, making it better and better.

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Internationalization in edge Rails and more

Posted by Chu Yeow July 20, 2008 @ 11:38 AM

There won’t be a Living on the Edge this week, but you won’t be starved for info because the Rails community is keeping up.

Ryan Daigle has been keeping up with some of the changes on edge Rails and has done a few awesome explanatory posts on them:

• Easy memoization with ActiveSupport::Memoizable
• Nested model mass assignments
• Metaclass accessor (aka the eigenclass)

Perhaps even more noteworthy is the introduction of I18n (internationalization) support to Rails core. Sven Fuchs explains the technical details and API as well as the history of Rails and I18n. I18n support is scheduled to be fully stable in the Rails 2.2 release. Have an interest in internationalization in Rails? Lend a hand with your ideas, feedback, and patches at the Google Group.

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Living on the Edge (or what's new in Edge Rails) #3

Posted by Chu Yeow July 06, 2008 @ 06:32 AM

There hasn’t been much of note in terms of big changes or features in edge Rails lately, so this time I’ll leave you to pore over the Rails commit logs for any bug fixes or minor changes that I haven’t pointed out. There has been some work in progress with ActionPack refactoring and multithreading work as well as some activity in ActiveModel too, but nothing really concrete yet (still very much a work in progress).

As usual, be sure to leave any suggestions and criticisms in the comments.

Thin support with script/server

script/server now checks for the availability of Thin and uses it. Pretty convenient if you are using Thin as your production server (and want to run the same when developing). You’ll have to add config.gem 'thin' to your environment.rb first to get this to work.

This patch was contributed by one of the guys at fluxin.

Changeset

String#humanize can be customized via inflection rules

The String#humanize core extension method is used convert strings with underscore, usually table column names, in them to pretty readable text. For example,

"actor_salary".humanize
=> "Actor salary" 
"anime_id".humanize
=> "Anime"

Sometimes this doesn’t work out so well though, when you have legacy tables or simply “inhumanely” named column names like “act_sal_money” (which is really “Actor salary”, but would be #humanize-d to “Act Sal Money”).

You can now specify custom inflection rules (just like you would for plural/singular/irregular/uncountable inflection rules):

Inflector.inflections do |inflect|
  inflect.human /_cnt$/, '\1_count'
  inflect.human 'act_sal_money', 'Actor Salary'
end

Notice how you can also use a regular expression above to convert columns like “click_cnt” to “Click count”.

Thumbs up to Dan Manges and Pascal Ehlert for this patch.

Changeset

Allow conditions on multiple tables to be specified using hash.

Pratik has committed a tiny (but really useful) change to ActiveRecord that allows you to specify conditions on a joined table in its own hash. An example would explain it better:

Anime.all(
  :joins => :character,
  :conditions => {
    :active => true,
    :characters => { :gender => 'female' }
  }
)

The ActiveRecord query above would find all “active” anime with “female” characters.

Changeset

Outro

That’s it for this week’s Living on the Edge – do let me know if you like to see more write-ups on even the minor bug fixes and changes that’d I’d left out this week.

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