So what was I unhappy about?

Configuration:

I was pretty unhappy with the way configuration was being done. I liked using Configatron to power the configuration, but I didn’t like the way I implemented the way I was using Configatron. For example, to set up one of the default settings, like the expiry time, you would configure it like such:

configatron.cachetastic_default_options.expiry_time = 30.minutes

Now you would configure that same option like this:

configatron.cachetastic.defaults.expiry_time = 30.minutes

That’s a little savings, but it really hits when you want to configure a particular cache. Let’s say we a cache called My::Super::AwesomeCache, to configure it in past versions of Cachetastic we would do this:

configatron.my_super_awesome_cache_options.expiry_time = 15.minutes

Now in Cachetastic 3.0.0 we configure like this:

configatron.cachetastic.my.super.awesome_cache.expire_time = 15.minutes.

As you can see all configuration now happens under the cachetastic namespace in Configatron. Then it’s a matter of using a Configatron namespace for each of your modules. I find it a lot easier to manage.

Another change in configuration is that in previous versions if you wanted to override one default configuration value for a particular cache,  you had to override them all. Now, you can just override the one value  you want, and the rest will be nicely inherited from the defaults.

Speed

Cachetastic has always been a very fast library, but I knew that more could be squeezed from that stone. With Cachetastic 3.0.0 you now get a hefty 25% improvement in the Memcached adapter and a whopping 99% in the LocalMemory adapter! Those are pretty awesome numbers. These numbers were easy to achieve when I stepped back and examined what it was I really wanted to do, and picked the most straightforward path to that goal.

Bloat

After more than two years Cachetastic was starting to suffer from a severe case of bloat. For example, I’ve never used the DRb adapter, have you? So why is it there? The same goes for the HtmlFile adapter. I wrote that because at my last job the operations team weren’t savvy  enough to be able to get Apache to talk to Memcached, so they wanted to serve HTML files, hence the rather awful adapter. Both of those adapters are now history.

There also used to be support for Rails Session Caching. Considering that most people are now using the Cookie store for sessions, there really is no need for this cache. It could also be argued that it should not have been bundled with Cachetastic at all. I would agree with those arguments. Cachetastic is, and should always be, a standalone caching framework, that can be plugged into Rails or any plain old Ruby project that needs caching support.

Also purged is automatic support for mixing in the Cachetastic::Cacheable module into ActiveRecord. If you want this functionality, it is very easy to include in your application. I don’t want to force it on anyone, so that is gone now.

Finally there are a handful of smaller features that I’m sure no one will miss that I’ve yanked out in the name of performance, reliability, and ease of maintenance.

Nice and Clean

When I realized what I really wanted, and what I didn’t want, it became clear that what was needed was a fresh code base. With that said, I hit delete (well, not really) and started over again. The code is now smooth, so much easier to read, and fast. In previous versions even my eyes went a bit crossed when I tried to figure out exactly what was going on. There where quite a few levels of indirection, and things just weren’t place where they probably should’ve been. That has all been fixed.

With a nice, clean code base comes a brand new set of tests. The tests are now extremely comprehensive, and while 2.x was very well tested, I know that 3.0.0, is tested to the hilt.

Because 3.0.0 is a brand new code base, I should probably stress the fact that is NOT backward compatible. So please be advised.

Installation:

$ sudo gem install cachetastic

Conclusion

I really hope everyone likes this brand new version of Cachetastic. I’m very happy with it, and I think if you give it a chance, you will be too.

If you’d like to have a peek at the RDoc, it can be found at:
http://cachetastic-api.mackframework.com/

With the help of the absolutely amazing multiruby library and an edge version of rspec from GitHub, the latest version of Configatron now supports JRuby 1.1.6 and Ruby 1.9.1rc1. There are no other functional changes to the library, so it’s a full drop in replacement for vesion 2.1.6.

I highly encourage everyone to checkout multiruby and start upgrading their libraries so we can all move to 1.9 quicker, which means more speed and more power. Once we’re all in 1.9 land we can really make use of some of the amazing features it provides.

Anyway, I’ll be working on upgrading all my libraries and applications to work on 1.8 and 1.9, and hopefully JRuby, over the next couple of months. So be on the look out for a new versions of Cachetastic, Genosaurus [update: Genosaurus already works with 1.9 and JRuby. Hoorah!], and, of course, Mack.

When you get a chance checkout Mat’s Github page, http://github.com/outoftime. Thank you very much Mat for your contribution.

The biggest request I’ve received is from people who want to use Configatron, but they want their own instance of it, and not the global singleton instance of it. Although, I personally don’t see why you would need that, I’m a big enough man to understand that just because I don’t need it, doesn’t mean others don’t.

Last night I was reviewing the code, because I was asked this question again, and in doing so I realized that power has been there all along. It’s actually very simple. When you make a call on Kernel#configatron it returns a singleton of the Configatron class, but after that all it does is return an instance of the Configatron::Store class. So if you want your own instance of Configatron, what you really want is an instance of the Configatron::Store class, which you can do like so:

 

Well, there you go, I hope that helps. Enjoy.

Before I get into what has to be my favorite feature since the distributed features of 0.7.0, and quite possibly my favorite feature in Mack today, let’s talk about a few of the other features in this release.

More Routing Enhancements

There are a few great new features in the routing system in this release. The first off is a real crowd favorite, Nested Resources. Just like Rails you can now nest resources in Mack.

http://www.mackery.com/routing/nested_resources

In Mack 0.8.0 we introduced the ability to put host information in the routes file. This would be used to match the host when matching a route as well as building the url for that route when using the url helpers. This made dealing with subdomains very easier. Well, to really give everyone that subdomain fu everybody loves, we’ve added the ability to put embedded parameters in the host parameter in routes. It’s pretty dang cool, let me tell you. Checkout these examples:

http://www.mackery.com/routing/misc

Pagination API

There is now a pagination API that’s part of the mack-orm API. The first implementation of this in the mack-data_mapper package. At its heart it’s extremely easily to implement for new ORMs, one method, and using it is just as easy. There will be a write up on using the API in the forth coming days.

Jabber Support

The mack-notifier package can now send notifications using the Jabber protocol.

!!Portlets!!

Portlets are what components in Rails should’ve been and they’re what slices in Merb should be. Portlets are a way off packaging a full Mack application into a Ruby Gem so they can easily be shared and used in other Mack applications. As you’re about to see, this simple page is all the information you need to know about developing, testing, packaging, and using Portlets.

Portlets encapsulate a whole Mack application, from controllers to views to models to configuration settings to your images, stylesheets and javascripts. This makes it possible to develop extremely rich applications and share them with other Mack applications.

http://www.mackery.com/portlets/developing
http://www.mackery.com/portlets/testing
http://www.mackery.com/portlets/packaging
http://www.mackery.com/portlets/using

Bug Fixes and Minor Feature Updates

As always there are great bug fixes and feature updates. Below is the changelog that outlines those improvements.

Changelog:

• [#217] Fixed rake mack:dump:routes throws errors
• [#216] Added ability to turn off view caching in distributed app
• [#215] Asset path lookup flow update
• [#213] Fixed the params method should be case insensitive
• [#211] Added a pagination API to mack-data_mapper
• [#210] Added a pagination API to mack-orm
• [#209] inline form built by link_to should include authenticity token
• [#208] Added support for DataMapper repository context per request
• [#207] Fixed session cookie not being deleted properly
• [#206] Portlet now have access to its base_path
• [#205] Fixed testing of nested parameters and file uploads breaks
• [#204] Resource routes can now take options when being defined.
• [#203] Updated distributed: view_cache to include Mack::ViewHelpers instead of Mack::ViewHelpers::LinkHelpers
• [#200] INCOMPATIBILITY NOTICE: mack-notifier configatron namespaces have changed from *_settings to * (e.g. smtp_settings to smtp)
• [#198] Added Embedded parameters in ‘host’ for Routes
• [#196] Extlib 0.9.8 support
• [#195] DataMapper 0.9.6 support
• [#193] Portlet Support
• [#192] mack-localization now supports portlet
• [#191] Asset-Packager support for Portlet
• [#143] Nested resources in Routes
• [#134] Form elements are now ‘errorfied’.
• [#131] Date/Time select boxes can now be easily re-arranged.
• [#78] Jabber support
• gem: configatron 2.1.5
• gem: extlib 0.9.8

Configatron Support

Mack 0.8.0 replaces the old application_configuration system with the new ultra sexy and cool, Configatron system. This is a much better way of doing system configurations, and I’m sure you’ll agree once you give it a spin. We’ve tried to take the edge off the conversion of these configuration systems with a helpful little rake task:

$ rake mack:update:configuration

For most cases, that task should do just fine. There might be a few places you have to tweak, such as in your own code, but once you do that, you’ll love Configatron!

For more information about using Configatron checkout this page:

http://www.mackery.com/configuration/configatron

A New Router

That’s right, the router in Mack has been completely rewritten from the ground up, yet unlike other frameworks, we’ve managed to keep our external API the same, so you don’t have to change your routes.rb at all. That’s a bit of good news, isn’t it?

What do you get with the new router? Well, for one, it should be faster, that’s always a plus. You can also now do ‘wildcard’ parameters in routes, use procs, extended ‘resourced’ routes, define ‘host’ and ‘scheme’ parameters, use regular expressions, and a few other little nifty things. Plus, because of the rewrite, it’s going to make it easier to extending the routing system to be even more powerful! In a future release, sometime in the 0.8.x series, you’ll even be able to plugin in your own router just by implementing a few API methods.

For more information about the new router, and what you can do, check out:

http://www.mackery.com/routing/index

Asset Management

There is now a really great asset management system that easily allows you to build bundles of CSS and JavaScript files to help keep your code neat and easy to use. Bundle that with the new mack-asset_packager gem, and support for asset hosts, you get a simple, easy, and fast way to compress and deliver your assets. 

For more information, checkout these helpful pages from the user guide:

http://www.mackery.com/views/asset_mgr
http://www.mackery.com/views/asset_host 

Misc.

As always, there’s a bunch of other great stuff just lurking around in this release. A better logger, for a start, more helpers, bug fixes, better error reporting, default 404 and 500 pages, and more. Please download and enjoy the release, I’m sure you’ll find worth it. Enjoy!

Changelog:

1. [#187] Fixed: When an exception is raised, the request doesn’t get ‘logged’
2. [#185] Fixed: .html is being appended to logged requests when there’s a 404
3. [#184] Request logging should also print the message of the status code
4. [#183] Updates to asset mgr/host
5. [#181] Content-type can now be set with calling render.
6. [#179] When configatron.mack.show_exceptions is false you now either the public/404.html or public/500.html file.
7. [#178] Added a configure parameter to turn off log coloring
8. [#176] Added a Google Analytics helper.
9. [#175] Generating urls should use host or scheme if defined
10. [#171] Ability to extend resources in routes
11. [#170] Regex support in routes
12. [#169] Proc support for Routes
13. [#168] Fixed ERB errors not being reported correctly.
14. [#167] Rake task to convert app config yamls to configatron
15. [#165] Asset Packager
16. [#164] Response helper for ‘attachments’
17. [#159] Added link_unless_current and link_if helpers
18. [#156] Added ‘Wildcard’ Routes support
19. [#152] INCOMPATIBILITY NOTICE: Removed deprecated support for delivered_emails use delivered_notifiers instead.
20. [#138] Added support for ‘host’ & ‘scheme’ parameters in routes
21. [#135] Replaced log4r with logging gem.
22. [#119] Freeze gems
23. [#106] INCOMPATIBILITY NOTICE: Removed deprecated support for droute_url
24. [#93] INCOMPATIBILITY NOTICE: Removed deprecated support for ‘top’ level ApplicationHelper
25. [#23] INCOMPATIBILITY NOTICE: Removed support for application_configuration and added support for configatron
26. gem: logging 0.9.4
27. gem: thin 1.0.0
28. gem: rspec 1.1.8
29. gem: configatron 2.1.4
30. gem: cachetastic 2.0.0

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!

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!

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.

Both give you the same results:

If you get a chance visit Simon’s blog at: http://5xm.org/ and say hi. Thanks again Simon.