Meta Bates

After more than two years powering production level applications I found that Cachetastic was starting to get a bit long in the tooth. I felt that there was a lot I could to make Cachetastic an even better library than it already was. I thought that I had added a bunch of cruft to the framework that people were just not using and maintaining it all seemed like a bit of a pointless chore.

So what was I unhappy about?

Configuration:

I was pretty unhappy with the way configuration was being done. I liked using Configatron to power the configuration, but I didn’t like the way I implemented the way I was using Configatron. For example, to set up one of the default settings, like the expiry time, you would configure it like such:

configatron.cachetastic_default_options.expiry_time = 30.minutes

Now you would configure that same option like this:

configatron.cachetastic.defaults.expiry_time = 30.minutes

That’s a little savings, but it really hits when you want to configure a particular cache. Let’s say we a cache called My::Super::AwesomeCache, to configure it in past versions of Cachetastic we would do this:

configatron.my_super_awesome_cache_options.expiry_time = 15.minutes

Now in Cachetastic 3.0.0 we configure like this:

configatron.cachetastic.my.super.awesome_cache.expire_time = 15.minutes.

As you can see all configuration now happens under the cachetastic namespace in Configatron. Then it’s a matter of using a Configatron namespace for each of your modules. I find it a lot easier to manage.

Another change in configuration is that in previous versions if you wanted to override one default configuration value for a particular cache,  you had to override them all. Now, you can just override the one value  you want, and the rest will be nicely inherited from the defaults.

Speed

Cachetastic has always been a very fast library, but I knew that more could be squeezed from that stone. With Cachetastic 3.0.0 you now get a hefty 25% improvement in the Memcached adapter and a whopping 99% in the LocalMemory adapter! Those are pretty awesome numbers. These numbers were easy to achieve when I stepped back and examined what it was I really wanted to do, and picked the most straightforward path to that goal.

Bloat

After more than two years Cachetastic was starting to suffer from a severe case of bloat. For example, I’ve never used the DRb adapter, have you? So why is it there? The same goes for the HtmlFile adapter. I wrote that because at my last job the operations team weren’t savvy  enough to be able to get Apache to talk to Memcached, so they wanted to serve HTML files, hence the rather awful adapter. Both of those adapters are now history.

There also used to be support for Rails Session Caching. Considering that most people are now using the Cookie store for sessions, there really is no need for this cache. It could also be argued that it should not have been bundled with Cachetastic at all. I would agree with those arguments. Cachetastic is, and should always be, a standalone caching framework, that can be plugged into Rails or any plain old Ruby project that needs caching support.

Also purged is automatic support for mixing in the Cachetastic::Cacheable module into ActiveRecord. If you want this functionality, it is very easy to include in your application. I don’t want to force it on anyone, so that is gone now.

Finally there are a handful of smaller features that I’m sure no one will miss that I’ve yanked out in the name of performance, reliability, and ease of maintenance.

Nice and Clean

When I realized what I really wanted, and what I didn’t want, it became clear that what was needed was a fresh code base. With that said, I hit delete (well, not really) and started over again. The code is now smooth, so much easier to read, and fast. In previous versions even my eyes went a bit crossed when I tried to figure out exactly what was going on. There where quite a few levels of indirection, and things just weren’t place where they probably should’ve been. That has all been fixed.

With a nice, clean code base comes a brand new set of tests. The tests are now extremely comprehensive, and while 2.x was very well tested, I know that 3.0.0, is tested to the hilt.

Because 3.0.0 is a brand new code base, I should probably stress the fact that is NOT backward compatible. So please be advised.

Installation:

$ sudo gem install cachetastic

Conclusion

I really hope everyone likes this brand new version of Cachetastic. I’m very happy with it, and I think if you give it a chance, you will be too.

If you’d like to have a peek at the RDoc, it can be found at:
http://cachetastic-api.mackframework.com/

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

Hey there folks, sorry for the long wait for this release, but it’s here. It’s been a long November for yours truly. I’ve had to find a new job. I’ve had pneumonia. We, at least in America, have celebrated Thanksgiving. And, of course, who can forget RubyConf 2008?

So with that said, what’s in 0.8.2? Honestly, not a whole lot. There are a couple of bug fixes, a button_to_remote (think submit_to_remote in Rails) helper, and deferred routes. More on deferred routes in a moment, as it’s actually a pretty cool feature that only Mack and Merb share. And finally there is bundled gems.

Bundled Gems

What do I mean I say ‘bundled gems’? Well, because of the rather large number of gems that get installed with Mack, and because of some gem version dependency issues, Mack is now bundling it’s third party dependency gems inside itself. For example, mack-facets used to rely on the gems ‘facets’ and ‘english’. Those gems are now bundled inside the mack-facets gem and now longer need to be downloaded and installed by end users. This should make installing Mack super easy. It should also make dealing with having multiple versions of Mack installed on your system easier to deal with and maintain.

Deferred? Routes

So what are deferred routes? Ezra wrote a really great write up back in April. The idea is simple, with newer web servers such as Thin and Ebb, you can tell them to spawn a new thread to handle particular requests, such as long running processes like file uploads. This can really help speed things up as server can process regular requests using an event machine model, which is very fast, but can be really slow and block the server for longer processes. Now those processes can spawn into their own threads and not block the server.

In Mack 0.8.2 you can mark your routes with a deferred? => true option which will trigger this behavior. It’s much more advanced than the similar feature that can be found in Merb, which requires a separate configuration for your deferred actions, and the urls have to be ‘hard coded’. Mack let’s you use all the dynamic power of your routes, like you would want to. It’s just another option on the route itself. For a great tutorial on using deferred routes, check out the following page on www.mackery.com:

http://www.mackery.com/routing/deferred_routes

Upgraded Dependencies

A few gems have been upgraded as part of this release, the big ones include DataMapper to 0.9.7, ActiveRecord to 2.2.2, and Haml to 2.0.4.

Changelog:

• [#237] Fixed render :rjs throws errors
• [#236] Upgraded to ActiveRecord 2.2.2
• [#235] Upgraded to DataMapper 0.9.7
• [#230] Upgraded to facets 2.4.5
• [#229] Upgraded to english 0.3.1
• [#227] Removed WEBrick logging
• [#226] Bundled gems.
• [#225] Removed dependency on Thin
• [#223] Fixed mackery console fails
• [#148] Added button_to_remote helper method.
• [#16] Added deferred? routes.
• gem: active_record 2.2.2
• gem: data_mapper 0.9.7
• gem: addressable 2.0.0
• gem: facets 2.4.5
• gem: english 0.3.1
• gem: rspec 1.1.11
• gem: haml 2.0.4

Here it is the 0.8.0 release of Mack! What a fun and exciting release it is as well. There are a few big changes under the hood, all for the better of course, but there’s only really one that will cause existing Mack projects some conversion pain. However, we’ve tried to take the sting out of that with a helpful rake task.

Configatron Support

Mack 0.8.0 replaces the old application_configuration system with the new ultra sexy and cool, Configatron system. This is a much better way of doing system configurations, and I’m sure you’ll agree once you give it a spin. We’ve tried to take the edge off the conversion of these configuration systems with a helpful little rake task:

$ rake mack:update:configuration

For most cases, that task should do just fine. There might be a few places you have to tweak, such as in your own code, but once you do that, you’ll love Configatron!

For more information about using Configatron checkout this page:

http://www.mackery.com/configuration/configatron

A New Router

That’s right, the router in Mack has been completely rewritten from the ground up, yet unlike other frameworks, we’ve managed to keep our external API the same, so you don’t have to change your routes.rb at all. That’s a bit of good news, isn’t it?

What do you get with the new router? Well, for one, it should be faster, that’s always a plus. You can also now do ‘wildcard’ parameters in routes, use procs, extended ‘resourced’ routes, define ‘host’ and ‘scheme’ parameters, use regular expressions, and a few other little nifty things. Plus, because of the rewrite, it’s going to make it easier to extending the routing system to be even more powerful! In a future release, sometime in the 0.8.x series, you’ll even be able to plugin in your own router just by implementing a few API methods.

For more information about the new router, and what you can do, check out:

http://www.mackery.com/routing/index

Asset Management

There is now a really great asset management system that easily allows you to build bundles of CSS and JavaScript files to help keep your code neat and easy to use. Bundle that with the new mack-asset_packager gem, and support for asset hosts, you get a simple, easy, and fast way to compress and deliver your assets. 

For more information, checkout these helpful pages from the user guide:

http://www.mackery.com/views/asset_mgr
http://www.mackery.com/views/asset_host 

Misc.

As always, there’s a bunch of other great stuff just lurking around in this release. A better logger, for a start, more helpers, bug fixes, better error reporting, default 404 and 500 pages, and more. Please download and enjoy the release, I’m sure you’ll find worth it. Enjoy!

Changelog:

1. [#187] Fixed: When an exception is raised, the request doesn’t get ‘logged’
2. [#185] Fixed: .html is being appended to logged requests when there’s a 404
3. [#184] Request logging should also print the message of the status code
4. [#183] Updates to asset mgr/host
5. [#181] Content-type can now be set with calling render.
6. [#179] When configatron.mack.show_exceptions is false you now either the public/404.html or public/500.html file.
7. [#178] Added a configure parameter to turn off log coloring
8. [#176] Added a Google Analytics helper.
9. [#175] Generating urls should use host or scheme if defined
10. [#171] Ability to extend resources in routes
11. [#170] Regex support in routes
12. [#169] Proc support for Routes
13. [#168] Fixed ERB errors not being reported correctly.
14. [#167] Rake task to convert app config yamls to configatron
15. [#165] Asset Packager
16. [#164] Response helper for ‘attachments’
17. [#159] Added link_unless_current and link_if helpers
18. [#156] Added ‘Wildcard’ Routes support
19. [#152] INCOMPATIBILITY NOTICE: Removed deprecated support for delivered_emails use delivered_notifiers instead.
20. [#138] Added support for ‘host’ & ‘scheme’ parameters in routes
21. [#135] Replaced log4r with logging gem.
22. [#119] Freeze gems
23. [#106] INCOMPATIBILITY NOTICE: Removed deprecated support for droute_url
24. [#93] INCOMPATIBILITY NOTICE: Removed deprecated support for ‘top’ level ApplicationHelper
25. [#23] INCOMPATIBILITY NOTICE: Removed support for application_configuration and added support for configatron
26. gem: logging 0.9.4
27. gem: thin 1.0.0
28. gem: rspec 1.1.8
29. gem: configatron 2.1.4
30. gem: cachetastic 2.0.0