Meta Bates

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.

This release contains protection of already defined methods, such as object_id. This comes from Configatron advocate, Don March. Thanks Don!

Also in this release is a much improved inspect method.

As you can see the results of the inspect are a nice, alphabetized, ‘cut and paste-able’, print out of your configuration settings.

As always, it may take sometime for the gem mirrors to get the release. If you want it now you can install it using www.mackgems.com as the source:

$ sudo gem install configatron --source=http://www.mackgems.com

Look for Configatron support in the next release of Mack, 0.8.0, due out on Monday!

On the heels of yesterday’s release of Configatron 2.0.0, Cody Maggard has generously donated a patch to add the following methods: unprotect, protect_all!, and unprotect_all!

Cody is also the developer of the configatron-rails plugin which makes integrating configatron into your Rails app pretty darn easy. You can checkout his project on GitHub. Thanks Cody!

I’ve spent the last few days incorporating Configatron 1.x into the Mack framework, for our forth coming 0.8.0 release. During that time, I’ve released that Configatron could be better, and that it should be better. I got quickly annoyed with the multiple lines of code I needed to write to just to set a single ‘nested’ parameter. I got frustrated trying to set default values for libraries, after, I had already loaded the user’s configurations. Why couldn’t I easily check to see if a parameter was nil or not? So taking all that into account, as well as some great feedback from users, Configatron 2.0.0 was born. It’s a complete rewrite of the library. It’s quicker, and easier to use.

Just take a look at this example:

It definitely doesn’t get much easier than that!

With this new release you can protect parameters to prevent end users from modifying them:

Since most configurations systems get loaded before outside libraries, you can run into a problem where the library is expecting certain parameters to be set, but your end user hasn’t set them all, they’ve just set the few that are important to them. So what do you do? You don’t want to override the end user’s settings, Configatron can now help you with that:

Of course, these are just some of the enhancements in 2.x Please read the README file and checkout the API for more information.

Mark your calendars, on Day One, from 1.15PM – 2.00PM, in Room 2, I’ll be delivering a presentation on building distributed applications.

http://www.rubyconf.org/talks/15

Building multiple applications that all need to share data and other information between can be a daunting and challenging task. Mark will help to demystify the use of Ruby systems such as Rinda and DRb and show you how they can be used to link applications together. Through the development of the Mack framework and its use in building Helium.com, Mark will share the highlights and the pitfalls of distributed application development.

Make sure and sign up for the conference today, as attendance is limited to only 500.