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Riding Rails

Announcing the Rails activistsJanuary 5

Bringing Rails and Merb together is about more than just merging the respective code. We’re also picking up the best ideas from both communities beyond the code. Following on Merb’s success in offering a strong evangelism effort, we’re pleased to announce the creation of the Rails activists:

The mission of the Rails activists is to empower and support the worldwide network of Ruby on Rails users. We do this by publicizing Rails, making adoption easier, and enhancing developer support.

At launch, we’ve identified seven areas where the Rails activists can contribute to the Rails ecosystem:

• Public Relations with media of all sizes
• Ombudsman work to ensure good user-to-user support
• Community Leadership at events and conferences
• Media Organization to help create good promotional opportunities
• Website maintenance
• Documentation efforts
• Developer support

The initial members of the Rails activists are Gregg Pollack, Matt Aimonetti, Ryan Bates, and Mike Gunderloy. But we can’t do all this alone, nor do we want to! Our v

This Week in Edge RailsJanuary 2

December 27, 2008-January 2, 2009

Happy New Year! Apparently the Rails core team was not doing too much partying to end the old year: we had 35 commits hit the edge tree, and some of them involved very substantial work. Here’s my weekly overview of some of the most visible and significant changes.

Optimization of respond_to

In some of the first fruits of the Rails-Merb team merger, Yehuda Katz took a look at the respond_to method, which is of course heavily used in many Rails applications to allow your controller to format results differently based on the MIME type of the incoming request. After eliminating a call to method_missing and some profiling and tweaking, he reports an 8% improvement in the number of requests per second served with a simple respond_to that switches between three formats. The best part? No change at all required to the code of your application to take advantage of this speedup. commit commit

If you want a preview of what else to expect from Rails 3, you might want to dip into Yehuda’s own fork of the Rails tree I’ll be covering these changes as they make their way back into the master copy of edge Rails.

Dynamic Scopes for Active Record

This Week in Edge RailsDecember 26 2008

December 20-December 26, 2008 Edition

The biggest change in Rails in recent memory isn’t reflected in edge Rails yet: I’m speaking, of course, about the merger of Merb into Rails 3 . There is a 3-0-unstable branch in the repository, but it hasn’t yet started to diverge from the main line of development. I’ll continue to focus on the master branch, which will be released as Rails 2.3, for the time being.

And Rails 2.3 is still cooking along. The team managed 39 commits this week, despite people taking holiday time off. Many of those were minor bug fixes, but here are a few things you might want to track in the new development.

Unified rendering

ActionController::Base#render is a lot smarter about deciding what to render. You can just throw things at it and expect to get the right results. If you’re using Rails 2.2, you often need to supply explicit information to render: render :file => '/tmp/random_file.erb' render :template => 'other_controller/action' render :action => 'show' Now in Rails 2.3, you can just supply what you want to render: render '/tmp/random_file.erb' render 'other_controller/action' render 'show' render :show Rails chooses between file, template, and action depending on whether there is a leading slash, an embedded slash, or no slash at all in what’s to be rendered. Note that you can also use a symbol ins

Merb gets merged into Rails 3!December 23 2008

It’s christmas, baby, and do we have a present for you. We’re ending the bickering between Merb and Rails with a this bombshell: Merb is being merged into Rails 3!

We all realized that working together for a common good would be much more productive than duplicating things on each side of the fence. Merb and Rails already share so much in terms of design and sensibility that joining forces seemed like the obvious way to go. All we needed was to sit down for a chat and hash it out, so we did just that.

What this will mean in practice is that the Merb team is putting their efforts into bringing all of the key Merb ideas into Rails 3. Yehuda Katz will outright join the Rails core team, Matt Aimonetti will work on a new evangelism team, and Carl Lerche and Daniel Neighman (hassox) will be co-starring the effort to bring all this over. We’ve immortalized the merge with plaque page at rubyonrails.org/merb.

What’s being brought over?
Some of the key ideas that they’ll be taking with them from Merb into Rails 3 are:

• Rails core: Yes, Rails is a full-stack framework and will remain so, but there’s no reason we shouldn’t also make it possible to run with less than the full monty. Rails 3 will make it easy to run just a bare minimum and then allow you to opt in just the stuff you want, if that’s necessary for your particular situ

Mild refresh of rubyonrails.orgDecember 21 2008

We’ve just launched a mild refresh of the rubyonrails.org site. It now runs on Radiant through Passenger at Slicehost and includes a nip and tuck in various places along with a couple of new pages. Read about how we prefer to deploy Rails applications, the ecosystem that has sprung up around Rails, and see the much expanded list of prolific Rails applications.