Meta Bates

The great guys over at RailsEvny.com have been nice enough again to include Mack in one of their podcasts. If you aren’t a regular subscriber to the podcast (and why not?), you really should be. Take a listen:

http://railsenvy.com/2008/10/15/rails-envy-podcast-episode-051-10-15-2008

Thanks again guys for the inclusion, and keep up the good work!

The release of Mack 0.7.0 was featured as the lead story this week in the railsenvy.com podcast. They guys had great things to say about Mack, have a listen:

http://www.railsenvy.com/2008/9/3/rails-envy-podcast-episode-045-09-03-2008

As always, if you don’t subscribe to the podcast, you definitely should. It’s one of the best ones around.

http://www.railsenvy.com/2008/7/23/rails-envy-podcast-episode-039-07-23-2008

If you’re not familiar with the podcast, I highly recommend checking it out. It’s a very informative, and highly entertaining podcast about all things Ruby.

Good work guys, keep it up!

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.

Well, um… the title of the post really says it all. Mack is briefly discussed about 3/4 of the way in.

Here’s the podcast: http://railsenvy.com/assets/2008/3/12/Podcast_22.mp3

Make sure to checkout their other podcasts, RailsEnvy.com Those guys do a great job, and their quite funny to listen to as well.

Other Mack Sitings:

http://www.nomedojogo.com/2008/03/13/rails-podcast-brasil-episodio-9/ – This appears to be the RailsEnvy podcast in Portuguese, but since I don’t speak Portuguese, so I can’t really say.

http://blog.libinpan.com/2008/03/13/links-for-2008-03-13/