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

0.5.5.3:

The new version of Passenger (aka mod_rails) now has support for Rack based applications. In their documentation they show how to use a Mack app with Passenger. The documentation is based on the yet to be released Thin adapter. With that said, both of those systems use a piece of Mack that’s no longer there. Because of that I’ve restored the small section of code, to make sure those two systems work with Mack. Which is great news.

On some flavors of Unix when you do a Dir.glob you don’t necessarily get back an ordered list of files. Because of that some people we’re getting uninitialized constant errors. This has also been addressed in 0.5.5.3.

0.5.5.4:

A couple of people have reported issues where they were getting the following error even with the most simple application:

“Rack::Lint::LintError: env missing required key QUERY_STRING”

A Mack supporter by the name of Andre Ludwig stepped up to help me try and figure out the problem. I couldn’t reproduce it on the machines I have access to, I suppose that goes without saying, because I could’ve reproduced it, I would’ve fixed it sooner. Anyway, Andre stepped up with both his time, spending most of his Sunday online with me, but also with his hardware. Andre opened up his server to me so I could go in there directly and play with things until I found the problem.

Sure enough, once I got in there, it didn’t take me too long to figure out what the problem was. It turned out to be a conflict between the latest version of Mongrel (1.1.5) and the latest version of Thin (0.8.1). A simple rewrite of the rake server task and voila! problem solved.

So I would like to say thanks so much to Andre Ludwig for all his time and his hardware. I would also like to thank Saji for originally reporting the problem and for doing some troubleshooting for me as well.

As the community grows I can’t help but be awed by not only how much people are loving what Mack is doing, but also by the communities willingness to get involved and help out. Thanks so much everyone!

Changelog 0.5.5.4:

• Fixed the damn Lint error some people were facing!

File uploads are now pretty easy to do. There’s a new Mack::Request::UploadedFile that helps to wrap the Hash that Rack gives you when you upload a file. Here’s a simple example of it being used:

class UploadsController < Mack::Controller::Base
  def create
    @my_new_file = request.file(:my_new_file)
    @my_new_file.save_to([MACK_PUBLIC, "uploaded_files", @my_new_file.file_name])
  end
end

That’s it! That’s all you need to upload a file! I’m going to add file uploads to the blog demo over the next few days.

You can now do ‘namespaced’ routes, such as Admin::UserController. You can very simply map them in your routes.rb as:

r.resource "admin/users"

There’s now a new rake task, generator:list, that shows all the generators available to your app.

Darsono Sutedja gets the prize for being the first person, other than myself, to contribute to Mack. Thanks a ton Darsono! It’s much appreciated.

All of the generators now use the Genosaurus generator system. Not really that exciting, but it makes for a nice, cleaner code base.

There’s a few other things in there as well. The changelog below has a few more things. Enjoy!

Changelog:

• Added Mack::Request::UploadFile class to make dealing with file uploads easy.
• Fixed bug where if a controller didn’t exist it wasn’t checking the public directory.
• Generated DataMapper models no longer extend DataMapper::Base, but rather ‘include DataMapper::Persistence’. This corresponds to the 0.9.0 upcoming release of DataMapper.
• Fixed a bug in request.params that was making file uploads into strings.
• Namespaced resourced routes, such as Admin::UserController, now work.
• Added rake generator:list task to list all the available generators.
• scaffold generator now creates a stub functional test.
• model generator now creates a stub unit test.
• Rake tasks in plugins now show up in the Rake tasks list.
• All generators, including the ‘mack’ binary are now using Genosaurus.
• [dsutedja] initializer will load MACK_APP/controllers/default_controller.rb if it exists
• [dsutedja] added link_image_to and image_tag to html helper.
• gem: thin 0.8.1
• gem: genosaurus 1.1.1

When the next version of Thin comes out, there will be an update to Mack to support these changes.

There’s been a general overhaul of the generators included with Mack. Mostly, cleaning them up. With that said things like the scaffold, model, and migration generators have been updated to do what a lot of people have been asking for, that is take a ‘cols’ parameter and build out the generated code corrrectly. This really makes life, very, very simple.

There will be a re-written ‘blog’ tutorial coming out soon to make use of this, as well as migration support that’s now part of Mack.

Very exciting stuff! Enjoy!

Changelog:

• Mack now uses Erubis, http://www.kuwata-lab.com/erubis/, for it’s rendering engine instead of ERB. This makes Mack even faster now! Yippie!
• Added rake generate:model name=<model_name> (optional: cols=<col_1>:<col_1_type>,<col_2>:<col_2_type>) This will also create a migration for you.
• Updated rake generate:migration name=<model_name> (optional: cols=<col_1>:<col_1_type>,<col_2>:<col_2_type>) This will create the proper table migration for you.
• Updated rake generate:scaffold to use the ModelGenerator now.
• ScaffoldGenerator now create input fields based on the type of columns, if any, passed in.
• Overall general refactoring of the generator classes.
• Fixed a bug with request logging not, well, logging.
• gem: erubis 2.5.0
• gem: thin 0.8.0

If you find a bug, please head on over to RubyForge and submit a ticket for it, and I’ll do my best to turn it around as quick as possible.

Changelog:

• gem: thin 0.7.0

• gem: cachetastic 1.3.1

• Fixed 18487: #convert_security_of_methods ignores new_level param

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.

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…)