Meta Bates

Well folks, RailsConf ‘08, is just about upon us. I’m heading out to Portland, are you? If so, let’s make contact. It’ll be great to meet everyone who’s been following Mack and supporting what we’re doing here.

I’m going to be leading a Birds of a Feather session Thursday night, “Rails Alternatives and You” from 7.30pm – 8.30pm in room D133. There are going to representatives of Merb and DataMapper there as well, so it should be a good time. Again, it’d be great to meet some of you.

On Friday during lunch at 12.35pm, I’ll be signing copies of the ‘Advanced Rails Recipes’ book at the Powell’s Book booth, along with some of the other authors. I think I’m more excited about this than anything else happening at the rest of the conference!

For those of you who have been to a RailsConf in the past, know it’s a great time. For those who haven’t, it’s a great time. Last year I got to meet a lot of great people, and this year I’m looking forward to meeting more. I hope you’ll be one of them.

See ya in Portland.

It dawned on me today as I released 0.4.1 that’s it has been one month since the first release, 0.0.4. What a month it’s been! When 0.0.4 got released I hadn’t been working on Mack for more than a few weeks. So really, Mack has been going for about six weeks now. It’s funny to think how far the code has progressed, how many features have been developed, and most importantly, how much attention it’s received.

Firsts:

• First Bug: Matt Todd found the first bug with a Mack. It was a simple bug with convert_security_of_methods the second parameter wasn’t being used. Matt has since become a good friend of Mack, and has a couple of other firsts on this list.
• First Blog Comment: Mr. Eel questioning the validatey of some rough DataMapper vs. ActiveRecord numbers I posted.
• First Link to Mack: Matt Todd gets his second ‘first’ of this list.
• First ‘Demo’ Request: Gregg Pollack from RailsEnvy.com requested a demo app so he could feature Mack on the RailsEnvy.com podcast.
• First Podcast: I think this one is fairly obvious, but it goes to the RailsEnvy.com guys. Thanks for the press!
• First Speaking Request: Tom Dyer/Boston Ruby Users Group. I’ll be speaking May 13th on the joys of Mack.
• First Request to Contribute: Arun Agrawal.
• First Tech Support Request: Brian Dunbar. He had some trouble running the demo app. Turns out it was a bad require in the cachetastic gem, that I subsequently fixed.
• First ‘Watcher’ on GitHub.com: Once again, Mr. Matt Todd! Gotta love the Matt.
• First Fork on GitHub.com: Kabari Hendrick. Based out of Chicago, http://www.threedozen.com/, I’m excited to see what he does with his fork.

Wow! That’s a lot of firsts for a first month. Here’s a list of some of the features that have been released in that time:

• Distributed Routes!
• Better testing support
• Built-in encryption/decryption
• XML support
• A Generator framework
• ‘Scaffold’ generator
• Plugin support
• Server-side redirects
• Inflection
• Render url
• Extensible rendering system
• ‘Format’ driven content

That’s just a few things that have gone in there. That’s not to mention refactoring, documentation, demo apps, etc…

I’d like to this time to say thank you to everyone on the ‘firsts’ lists. I would like to thank everyone else who’s shown interest, commented, wrote about, or even just thought of Mack. Every comment on the site, every email I get, every blog link I see fills me with great happiness and makes me think that I’m on to something here.

I truly feel that there is a void for a Ruby web framework that deals with distributed, portal-like applications, and that’s where Mack is headed. That’s what makes Mack different from Rails or Merb or Ramaze or Sinatra or any other framework out there.

What’s on the horizon for Mack? A lot. I’m going to be speaking at the Boston Ruby Users Group on May 13th. Of course, I’ll be showing off Mack, so if you’re in town, I would recommend coming on down. Details on that as we get closer to the event. You can expect more app to app communication, more generators, more ORM support, more testing support, page caching, ‘portlets’, and much much more!

Once again, thanks to everyone for their support. I’m looking forward to see what the future holds.

It’s finally here! The release you’ve all been waiting for, 0.4.0!! What’s new in this one? Well, the big one, DISTRIBUTED ROUTING!!! Now you can share your routes between all of your Mack applications.

I’m very excited about this release. This is one of the first features that starts to set Mack apart from other Ruby frameworks such as Rails and Merb.  Mack is trying to set itself as the framework for doing multiple, distributed, portal applications. This release gets us headed in that direction.

There will be a tutorial post and app in the next few days. In the meantime I highly encourage you to download this release and check it out.

Changelog:

• Added Distributed Routes!

• gem: mack_ruby_core_extensions 0.1.3

• removed gem: ruby_extensions

$ sudo gem install mack

After two years of developing Menderchuck using Rails, I sat down with the VP of Development and the Director of Development and we took at a look at what the future of the company. We reviewed some of the stuff the business would like to build and where the CEO saw the company headed, and we looked at the technologies we were using and determined that it was time to investigate alternatives.

The first things to come under the microscope were Rails/Mongrel. As previously stated we found Rails to be a bit too opinionated for our use. One of the big jokes within the dev team was that I was basically rewriting Rails one section at a time. As sad as that joke is, it’s partially true.

I started to investigate other frameworks, particularly Merb and Ramaze, both of which are great frameworks. Both are lightweight and fast, and are a great alternative to Rails. But, they both didn’t quite offer what Menderchuck needed to grow into the future.

Menderchuck needed a platform that was fast and scalable. We needed something that would allow us to be a portal application. We needed something that was easy to deploy. We wanted to be able to build/deploy separate applications and have them ‘automagically’ linked together. And most importantly we needed something very configurable, and less opinionated.

In the search for a framework utopia, I came across two technologies I really fell in love with, Rack and Thin.

(More to come…)