Meta Bates

Thanks to the cold and snowy New England winter this year, I’ve been able to devote quite a bit of time to getting Mack to run on Ruby 1.9, so with that said, here’s the 0.8.3 release of Mack, featuring… TADA… Ruby 1.9!! Of course there are a few other features and improvements in this release. Here’s a quick run down:

Ruby 1.9

The big one. Mack runs very well on Ruby 1.9, unfortunately I can’t say the same thing about some other frameworks. I’ve had some run ins with DataMapper on 1.9, but I’m sure those will be ironed out shortly.

A few weeks ago I announced I was working on getting Ruby 1.9 support for all my gems and libraries. I started out with Configatron, then upgraded Cachetastic and Genosaurus. Now Mack is 1.9 compatible. When I made the announcement the guys at RailsEnvy picked up on it and said that I made a call to arms to the community to pick up 1.9 support. Now granted, I didn’t actually say those words, but I think the intent was there, so I’m going to now officially say those words. This is a ‘call to arms’ to the Ruby community to upgrade their gems, plugins, libraries, frameworks, etc… to work on Ruby 1.9. I’ve done it, and I can tell you, it’s not that tough. Just use multiruby, and you’re off and running.

ActiveSupport In, Facets Out

What with the world getting smaller these days, well, at least the world of Ruby web frameworks. A lot of great work is going into refactoring ActiveSupport and making it faster, better, and smaller. Because of that and the fact that every time a new release of Facets comes out it breaks a whole lot of stuff, I’ve decided to use ActiveSupport as the basis of the mack-facets gem. So basically mack-facets is just ActiveSupport with a few more enhancements.

JavaScript Effects

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Gerardo Pis-Lopez, mack-javascript, has been upgraded to add helpers methods for effects for both Prototype/Scriptaculous and jQuery. Thank you to Gerardo for the much needed upgraded to mack-javascript.

Upgrades

Mack has been upgraded to use Rack 0.9.1, DataMapper 0.9.9, and a few other smaller gems.

Changelog:

• [#243] Upgraded to Rack 0.9.1
• [#242] Upgraded to DataMapper 0.9.9
• [#241] Removed dependency on Facets
• [#239] Add do_sqlite3 to gems.rb
• [#166] Effects for mack-javascript
• [#133] Added Form Builders
• [#22] Ruby 1.9 Support
• gem: rack 0.9.1
• gem: rspec 1.1.12
• gem: configatron 2.2.2
• gem: cachetastic 2.1.2
• gem: data_mapper 0.9.9
• gem: addressable 2.0.1
• gem: extlib 0.9.9

Why did I fall in love with Rack and Thin? That’s easy. I love Thin because it lives up to it’s name. It’s thin. It’s incredibly fast, has great clustering support built in, and is the next generation of Ruby web servers. It kicks Mongrel’s ass and it takes names. I’m sure if you asked Zed Shaw he would have no problem with Thin replacing Mongrel.

Rack I love because of it’s simplicity, and it’s uniformity. It’s setting out to create a standard for which any Ruby web application can very easily be plugged into a web server. By abstracting that layer out it makes it easier for developers to focus on writing great apps, and not having to worry about how to deploy them.

Once I started to play around with Rack it didn’t take me more then a few minutes to have a very simple site up and running.

Within a few days I had the basics of a Rails like framework rocking, and within two weeks I had the core of Mack coded, and that’s where I am today.

Mack is a very fast, stable, and extensible framework. It’s designed to be lean and mean and not be all things to all people. It’s meant to get you started on the right path, but to let you have your own opinions. It’s designed to help you build portal applications simply and efficiently, and deploy with just as much ease.

Mack is ORM agnostic, although it does have some special hooks for ActiveRecord and DataMapper. It does not force you to use a certain type of system for doing web services, although it does promote a RESTful lifestyle. Configuration and setup is system, but there’s no reason for you to use it as is out of the box.

Mack encourages experimentation, and  it hopes that you customize it make it your own.

Go and scour through the API and then download the gem and start building your next generation application the way YOU want to, not the way someone else tells you you have to.