Meta Bates

Well, it’s finally here, Mack 0.6.0! This release has taken a long time, but I feel that it’s definitely worth it. This has to be the best release of Mack to date. During this release the Mack dev team grew by 100%, Darsono Sutedja, previously a contributor to Mack, is now a full time Mack core team developer! Darsono has done an absolutely great job on this release, thanks Darsono. With that out of the way, let’s jump straight to the good stuff, shall we?

DataMapper 0.9.2 Support

At long last Mack supports DataMapper 0.9.2. Because previous versions of Mack used DataMapper 0.3.2, there is some upgrade work that you’ll need to do, but trust me, it’s worth it. DataMapper 0.9.2 is a gigantic leap forward from 0.3.2. If you have problems installing the data_mapper gem, make sure that you don’t have gems.datamapper.org in your source path for rubygems. You can remove it with the following command:

gem source -r http://gems.datamapper.org 

RSpec Testing Support

RSpec is now the default testing framework for new Mack applications. This innovative testing framework makes it fun, and simple, to do behavior driven development. If you haven’t yet played with RSpec, I would highly recommend it. I wasn’t a big fan of ‘spec’ testing prior to meeting Adam French, of DataMapper fame, and he turned me on to the joys of rspec. I think you’ll like it too, if you give it a chance.

mack-more

There is now a mack-more package. This will house all the optional gems available to the Mack framework. This include things like HAML and Markaby support, localization, etc… Use what you want, ignore the rest. This will help keep the core code clean, light, and of course, fast.

Localization/l10n Support

Darsono did a great job with the mack-localization gem. There is now optional support for internationalization in Mack applications. Check out the gem, it’s definitely worth it if you need to support multiple languages for your web application.

Much, much more!

Of course, there’s a lot more Mack than the stuff I just mentioned, there’s tons of bug fixes, some code clean up, some API changes, transactional testing support, the ability to catch specific errors in routes and have them diverted to a controller/action for handling.

There is a great wiki entry on upgrading your existing Mack project to 0.6.0 here. I highly recommend reading it whether or not you have an existing Mack application.

With this release the Mack team is also fully embracing Lighthouse. If you find bugs, or have suggestions please visit http://lighthouse.mackframework.com and log them there. You’ll also find the list of features that will eventually be added to Mack.

Changelog:

• INCOMPATIBILITY NOTICE: Moved Mack::Configuration.root to Mack.root
• INCOMPATIBILITY NOTICE: Moved Mack::Configuration.env to Mack.env
• INCOMPATIBILITY NOTICE: Mack::Configuration.* path methods no longer exist. Use mack-paths instead.
• INCOMPATIBILITY NOTICE: Dropped mack_ruby_core_extensions in favor or mack-facets
• INCOMPATIBILITY NOTICE: Mack::Controller::Base is now Mack::Controller (and it’s now a module)
• INCOMPATIBILITY NOTICE: Haml renderer is now part of mack-more.
• INCOMPATIBILITY NOTICE: Markaby renderer is now part of mack-more.
• INCOMPATIBILITY NOTICE: Changed request param’s accessor routine, from params(key) to params[key]
• INCOMPATIBILITY NOTICE: Test::Unit::TestCase is no longer the default testing framework, RSpec is. If you wish to use Test::Unit::TestCase add the following config parameter to your config/app_config/default.yml file:
    mack::testing_framework: test_case
• INCOMPATIBILITY NOTICE: ENV["_mack_env"] and ENV["_mack_root"] are no longer supported, please use ENV["MACK_ENV"] and ENV["MACK_ROOT"], or just Mack.env and Mack.root
• INCOMPATIBILITY NOTICE: MACK_DEFAULT_LOGGER constant is no longer available. Please use Mack.logger instead.
• INCOMPATIBILITY NOTICE: The ApplicationHelper module is now deprecated. Please move view level helpers into Mack::ViewHelpers::* and controller helpers into Mack::ControllerHelpers::<controller_name>
• thin.ru and thin.yml are no longer needed, you may delete them.
• RSpec assertions are now automatically added.
• Added a Mack::Testing::Response class to make testing of responses easier.
• moved test_extensions to testing and added the module Testing to the files in it.
• Added a dependency on mack-more
• Added a set of Rake tasks to update existing Mack applications.
• [#30] Added Mack::Logging::Filter to filter out unwanted parameters from the logs.
• In routing you can now define a route that will catch an Exception from another controller.
• ORM will not be initialized if the app never specify which ORM to use.
• All Mack unit tests are now written using rspec-1.1.4.
• mack command now takes an optional -t flag to determine which testing framework to use–value could be test_case or rspec [default]
• new setting added to app_config: testing_framework
• gem: cachetastic 1.7.2
• gem: application_configuration 1.5.0
• gem: erubis 2.6.2
• gem: genosaurus 1.2.1
• gem: thin 0.8.2
• gem: rspec 1.1.4

Well folks, as you know, things have been a bit quiet on the Mack front these days, but it’s all been for a very good reason. We’ve been prepping the next release, 0.6.0. This release is expected to hit the streets sometime the beginning of next week. There’s a lot of really great stuff in the release, DataMapper 0.9.2 support (finally!), RSpec testing support, a mack-more project to house a bunch of cool Mack related gems, Exception handling in Routing, and more… A full list will be available when the release happens.

In addition to the great new features, a lot of bugs have been worked out, and more of the API has solidified further. Because of some of these changes I’ve posted an upgrade guide from 0.5.x to 0.6.0. This guide can be found on the wiki. 

This guide is meant to make upgrading as quickly and as a painless possible. There are a couple of big changes, but they should be fairly simple to make.

I’m very happy with this release, it’s been long toiled over, and it shows. It’s very stable, fast, and fun. I think everyone is really going to like it. 

As more info about the release becomes available, I’ll keep everyone posted.

I’m sure everyone is wondering why things have been so quiet around the Mack front recently. Well, there are a couple of reasons. One, I’m on vacation in Ireland right now, so my coding time has dropped dramatically. Second, I’m still very much so patiently awaiting the 0.9.2 release of DataMapper, which the next version of Mack needs. Third, there is a lot of Mack work afoot at the moment.

The company I work has seen fit to give me a few more resources to help me make Mack the most kick ass framework out there. I’ve not got 1.5 more bodies diligently working away on Mack, with another body to hopefully be hired in the next full weeks. That will mean, within a few weeks there will be 3.5 full time bodies working on Mack! Awesome!

There are some great things that are going to be in the next build, but mostly it’ll be a nice refactoring. We’re going to splitting a bunch of stuff out of the core of Mack and putting into a mack-more package, similar to the approach Merb and DataMapper have adopted. In mack-more there will be l10n internationalization, RJS support (Prototype AND jQuery), DataMapper 0.9.x support, HAML, Markaby, PDF::Writer support, amongst others. It’ll be nice. Trust me.

We hope to have the next release out within the first or second week of July, of course, this really depends on when the DataMapper release can get out there. Once we get this release out, we can really focus on some extremely kick ass new features. Stay tuned!

Hey everyone, people have asked for it, so here it is, a Wiki for Mack:

http://wiki.mackframework.com/

I’ve placed a few tutorials up there, and it’ll be the defacto place for such information.

I highly encourage everyone to create an account and add to the knowledge base there.

On a different note, it looks like the next version of DataMapper will be out in the next few days. This is great news for Mack developers as the next release of Mack has been held back because it requires stuff in the DataMapper 0.9.2. Once that’s out, the next version of Mack will be right on it’s tail! Keep watching this space.

As I’ve told a lot of you my goal was to have a Mack release out by the end of RailsConf, which ends tomorrow, that would be rocking the newly released version of DataMapper, 0.9.1. The good news is I’ve pretty much got it all done, and it works great! The bad news is I’m not going to release it.

Why is this you might ask? Why aren’t I going to get Mack support for DataMapper 0.9.1 out there, if it already works. Great questions. The answer is simply this, migrations. I’ve spent most of the weekend hanging out with a great guy by the name of Adam French. Adam is one of the core developer’s of DataMapper. As a matter of fact, I just left Adam after we spent a couple of hours in the hotel bar writing a gem called, dm-voyeur, to allow for ‘observing’ of DataMapper::Resource objects.

Anyway, as I’ve been hanging out with Adam I’ve been trying to upgrade the Mack migration generator script to build the new style format for DataMapper 0.9.1. What I found though, was that migrations have a minor flaw, you have to write the SQL for the column! That means they aren’t portable! This bit me in the butt when I had a migration I wrote against Postgres that would run, but wouldn’t give me the results I expected in SQLite3. After spending most of the weekend complaining to Adam about this, he kindly pointed out that I have full commit access to DataMapper, and I should probably just fix the bloody thing myself. So that’s what I’ve done.

The great news is that migrations are now pretty sweet. The bad news is I’m not going to release Mack support for DataMapper 0.9.x until they put out the next release so everyone in the Mack universe can have a nice experience using the new migrations. Although I don’t know just when the next release of DataMapper will be, I estimate that it will be relatively soon. Keep an eye on this space.