Meta Bates

Quite often I get asked why don’t I blog more? Why don’t I tweet more? Why don’t I _fill in the blank_ more. The answer is I’m a busy man. I’m the CTO for a pre-funding startup, www.shortbord.com, the father of two adorable little boys, the lead singer of a Boston-based band, www.myspace.com/colawarvets, and that’s just the big stuff! I have to prioritize what I can spend my time on, and unfortunately some of my open source projects are the first to get the ax.

Why do the open source projects always seem to get the ax? Well, let me start by saying that they don’t always get the ax, but they certainly jump to the top of the list. There are certain libraries I’ve written, cachetastic and configatron, are the two most prominent that I use day in and day out. They will always get the love the deserve. Then there are projects like APN on Rails. I wrote it because I had an iPhone app (no longer available) that I wanted notifications for, and there was nothing else available for Ruby to do the job. The plugin took off like crazy and I was overwhelmed with patches, questions, bugs, etc… That was great, and I was happy to help, for a time, but alas, I haven’t written an iPhone app for ages, and I just don’t have time to maintain a plugin that I wasn’t even using.

A while ago I realized that the best thing for APN on Rails, myself, and for the community was to find someone to take over the project so that it got the love it deserved. I put out the call and the good folks over at PRX (Public Radio Exchange) answered the call. The folks at PRX have written some great iPhone apps, including the very popular “This American Life” app.

So I’m happy to announce that the new official home for APN on Rails is now at: http://github.com/PRX/apn_on_rails. I ask that you continue to show the same support to PRX that you have shown to me over the life of this plugin.

Again, thank you to everyone, and thank you to Rebecca Nesson and the folks over at PRX for picking up the project and giving it renewed life.

Hey there folks, I know it’s been awhile, so I thought I would give you all a very quick update as to how the book is going. It’s going really well. I’m about 100 pages into it, and it’s shaping up very nicely. Addison-Wesley is preparing to put it into their “Rough Cuts” program so you can all get your dirty little hands on what I’ve written so far as early as a few weeks from now, or so I’m told.

While I don’t want to give too much away about the contents, everybody loves a good surprise, let me say that part one of the book will be the most comprehensive guide to DRb and Rinda that you’ll find anywhere. Including the source code!!

I’m working hard on part two of the book which focuses on third party tools, frameworks, and libraries. It’s quite a fun part of the book to write as there are a great deal of choices out there, including my own Distribunaut. (PS. I released a new version of it on GitHub a week or so ago.) Writing about different libraries is quite fun as I get to really delve into the source code and see the good and bad ways people like to write code. Plus some of the libraries have really great features, or really turn things on their head.

When the book is available as a “Rough Cut”, I’ll certainly keep you all informed. In the mean time keep watching this space and have a great weekend!

So a lot has been made in the last few days about my decision to drop ActiveRecord’s native support in Mack. People have asked why can’t I keep what I already have in regards to support for ActiveRecord, and why can’t I support Sequel. So, I’ve decided to compromise.

In the next version of Mack, which should be out in the next day or two, I’ve broken out support for ActiveRecord and DataMapper into their own gems, http://github.com/markbates/mack-orm/tree/master. That means you’ll be able to still use ActiveRecord, if you want. The default ORM, however, will be DataMapper. That’s what you’ll get out of the box with Mack.

Now, keeping with my original post, I’ll be actively maintaining the mack-data_mapper gem, and when I can I’ll make similar changes to the mack-active_record, but I’m not promising anything. Now the good thing here is that since the repos for these gems are on GitHub, anyone can contribute changes/additions to them. I’ve even put a stub in there for Sequel support, that’s definitely something someone else will have to support.

This also has a nice advantage in keeping the Mack core clean and simple. Hopefully this will all lead to faster development time turn around for Mack.

It’s also worth noting that when I talk about ‘native’ support, all I mean is some Rake tasks and some generators. There’s nothing stopping anyone from using ANY ORM with Mack. You could even create your own, if you really wanted to.

Here’s to hoping this makes everyone happy!

So after my post about dropping ActiveRecord for DataMapper, I’ve received some very interesting feedback, mostly good, which is great. The best comment I received was from Sam Smoot, lead developer of DataMapper. Sam offered to give me commit access to the DataMapper repos on GitHub.

I took Sam up on his offer and I’ve already made several contributions. This is GREAT news for the Mack Framework. When the best technologies start working in concert, only good things can happen.

I’m really excited about what’s happening with DataMapper 0.9.0, and I know it’s only going to make Mack a better framework. I’ve already started working on upgrading Mack to use, the yet unreleased, DataMapper 0.9.0 code base.

I’ll keep you all posted.

The Mack source tree is now hosted on GitHub.com

http://github.com/markbates/mack

If you would like to pull it down you can clone it with:

git://github.com/markbates/mack.git

For those of you interested in contributing you can create an account with GitHub, fork the Mack project, go nuts with your changes, and then send me a pull request. It’s all very well explained on the GitHub site.

Enjoy!