Meta Bates

This is a pretty cool release. First off Thin has been updated to 0.8.0, a rather nice, stable release. ERB has been replaced with Erubis to give a significant improvement in speed, which, after all is one of Mack’s most important traits. 

There’s been a general overhaul of the generators included with Mack. Mostly, cleaning them up. With that said things like the scaffold, model, and migration generators have been updated to do what a lot of people have been asking for, that is take a ‘cols’ parameter and build out the generated code corrrectly. This really makes life, very, very simple.

There will be a re-written ‘blog’ tutorial coming out soon to make use of this, as well as migration support that’s now part of Mack.

Very exciting stuff! Enjoy!

Changelog:

• Mack now uses Erubis, http://www.kuwata-lab.com/erubis/, for it’s rendering engine instead of ERB. This makes Mack even faster now! Yippie!
• Added rake generate:model name=<model_name> (optional: cols=<col_1>:<col_1_type>,<col_2>:<col_2_type>) This will also create a migration for you.
• Updated rake generate:migration name=<model_name> (optional: cols=<col_1>:<col_1_type>,<col_2>:<col_2_type>) This will create the proper table migration for you.
• Updated rake generate:scaffold to use the ModelGenerator now.
• ScaffoldGenerator now create input fields based on the type of columns, if any, passed in.
• Overall general refactoring of the generator classes.
• Fixed a bug with request logging not, well, logging.
• gem: erubis 2.5.0
• gem: thin 0.8.0

Well, here it is! The release you all were waiting for, the one that finally gives migration support to Mack! That’s right, now whether you use ActiveRecord or DataMapper, you can use the familiar rake task ‘db:migrate’ to run your migrations. Yippie! The scaffold generator will also generate a migration for you, assuming you have ORM support enabled.

There’s still some work to go on this, like the ability to pass in command line args to the task to build the full migration for you, but it’s a start! It’s now pretty easy to get your app going.

Also in this release is a rewrite of the distributed routing functionality. It’s now been rewritten to use Rinda. This is going to be the standard for all the distributed functionality that will be coming Mack over the next couple of months. As more functionality lke this is developed, the more it will be wrapped in nice, easy to use APIs.

There’s also been some tidying up here in there in the code tree. For example, new applications don’t get generated with a boot.rb file. Looking at it, there’s really no need for it, since everything is done with Rake tasks.

Overall, I’m very happy with the release, and I feel that this release definitely makes Mack a VERY useable framework because of the migration support. Enjoy!

Changelog:

• Removed boot.rb file. It was unnecessary.
• When a new Mack application is generated the Rakefile that gets generated is stamped with the Mack gem version used to create it. This ties the project to that gem. This can, of course, be upgraded as new Mack gems come out, but it’s a good way of tying your app to a specific revision of Mack.
• Added support for migrations for both ActiveRecord and DataMapper. DataMapper migration support requires DataMapper 0.3.0 gem. Please keep in mind, though, that DataMapper 0.3.0 has a serious bug in it, which may prevent you from using it. Please see http://www.mackframework.com/2008/04/09/horrible-bug-in-datamapper-030/ for more information.
• Rewrote distributed routing support to use Rinda inside of plain old DRb. This makes for an almost zero configuration usage.
• Added: mack_ring_server binary to start a Rinda ring server for use with distributed routing.
• Sqlite3 is now the default database for Mack applications configured with ORM support.
• Added a test helper method, rake_task, to aid in the testing of Rake tasks.
• Added: rake generate:migration name=<migration_name>
• Added: rake db:migrate
• Added: rake db:abort_if_pending_migrations
• Added: rake db:rollback
• Added: rake db:version
• Added: rake mack:ring_server:start
• Added: rake mack:ring_server:stop
• Added: rake mack:ring_server:restart
• Added: rake mack:ring_server:services:list
• gem: application_configuration 1.2.2
• gem: daemons 1.0.10

http://www.rubyinside.com/mack-a-fast-best-of-the-rest-web-app-framework-856.html

As you may, or may not not, I’m a big fan of Ruby Inside. It’s one of my favorite Ruby based blogs on the web. Peter Cooper does a great job with this site, and has recently started the RubyFlow.com website, which is a bit more of a ‘firehouse of Ruby’ type site. 

Anyway, today Peter gave a very favorable review of Mack. I would definitely encourage you to head on over and have a read of it.

Thanks Peter.

Now that I’m back on track with DataMapper, I’ve got migration support for both it and ActiveRecord just about done. In addition to the actual rake task, db:migrate (btw), I had to set up a good way to test rake tasks, something I’ll share at a later date, but needless to say it’s included with Mack. I also had to deal with the pain in the ass-ness of dealing with two VERY different ORMs, in the same test system! Let me tell you, that sucked!

Good news is that things seem to be working, at least going in the ‘up’ direction anyway. I still need to write the ‘down’ direction revert stuff. Hopefully, that shouldn’t take too long now that I have a good way of testing the task and the migration stuff.

Unfortunately, I feel as though as soon as I release this stuff, which should be by the end of this weekend, DataMapper 0.9.0 will be out, and I’ll have to re-write most of the DataMapper stuff because the API is changing so radically. I guess I’ll just have to deal with that when the time comes.

In the meantime I’ll let y’all know when migrations are done and out there in the wild.

If like me you’re plagued by this DataMapper bug that kills your test cases. I’ve packaged up a temporary version of the DataMapper gem that seems to fix the problem.

WARNING: This gem is NOT sanctioned by the DataMapper team. Use at your own risk.

If you use this gem and find any issues, please let me know. Also, if you use this gem and things seem to be working just fine, then please let me know that too. Good luck!

DataMapper-0.3.0.1.gem