
Rails 2.3: Templates, Engines, Rack, Metal, much more - sant0sk1
http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2009/3/16/rails-2-3-templates-engines-rack-metal-much-more
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bryanwoods
Nested Model Forms are a timely addition. When I was learning Rails, I always
kind of assumed forms could work more like this. More information:
<http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2009/1/26/nested-model-forms>

The 2.3 release seems to go a long way to limiting the amount of configuration
required for all sorts of these slightly-bothersome tasks, which is really
nice.

~~~
zaius
It's been cleaned up a bit since that was posted. The release notes have a
nicer, more concise example:

<http://guides.rubyonrails.org/2_3_release_notes.html>

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mdemare
Is it me or has the development of Rails accelerated drastically lately? It
used to feel quite slow, and now it's very fast. Is it because they switched
to git? Any core developers here?

~~~
simon_kun
One of my favourite graphs for explaining the power of git is the Rails
traffic graph at github: <http://github.com/rails/rails/graphs/impact> . Track
right until the beginning of April '08. That's when Rails moved to git.

~~~
ankhmoop
Are you sure that's not just presenting the "authorship-preserving" nature of
git, rather than a significant increase in contributor diversity?

Note that as contributor diversity appears to increase, LoC/primary
contributor decreases.

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icey
Can a Rails person tell us if this is a big deal or not?

~~~
patio11
The templates feature ("start every Rails project with a default stack") is a
godsend to folks who routinely start new projects, such as freelancers with
quick turn around times or internal IT folks who crank out mini-applications.

I do a bunch of little utility projects for work (e.g. "Report X was
previously generated based on five Excel files which had to be manually
synched and executed, now the information is in one place on the intranet and
updated every night via a cron job.") When you have a project which takes
under a man-week a significant portion of the time is "Oh bloody heck I didn't
install the auto-complete gem", "Oh bloody heck I forgot I'd need Google
charts again.", "Oh bloody heck where did I put that syntax highlighter
plugin", etc.

This lets me spend less time fighting Rails configuration and more time
fighting Java XML configuration, like God intended.

~~~
gsiener
Just curious, what gems do you use for those sorts of projects? Any of them on
github to learn from/check out?

~~~
mtarnovan
Some of the gems worth checking out (you can find most of them on github):

* authlogic for authentication

* openrain-action_mailer_tls for using smtp with tls with ruby <1.8.7

* mislav-will_paginate for pagination

* rspec/rspec-rails/shoulda for testing

* settingslogic for application configuration

* haml/sass for templating

Also some useful plugins:

git://github.com/Bertg/i18n_action_mailer.git (i18n support in mailers)

git://github.com/iain/i18n_label.git (translate labels)

git://github.com/thoughtbot/limerick_rake.git (lots of useful rake tasks)

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ionfish
Perhaps some of the other Rails developers around here could satisfy my
curiosity: when do you do the work (minor or major) to update your
applications to use new releases? When the first or second RC comes out, or
only once the 'official', final release is ready? Or are you tracking edge
with an 'upgrade' branch or some equivalent?

~~~
jherdman
Generally speaking I upgrade whenever I get the chance, but I always wait for
an official release. Sometimes I let some of my smaller apps lag, but I try to
keep fairly recent so as not to hold back any other apps that might be relying
on major external requirements, such as Passenger ("mod_rails").

In the past I used to track edge, but that proved to be far too cumbersome.

