caboose

Lots of really cool fixes and features are going into Rails right now. I’m sure you all subscribe to Ryan Daigle’s “What’s new in Edge Rails” at http://ryandaigle.com/—if you don’t, go do it right now.

One of the advantages of having a Rails core committer on the team at ENTP is that we get to drink from the firehose of pain that is edge rails. Many a Campfire discussion ends like this: “There’s this new feature which will solve this problem”, says Rick, “but we’ll have to move to Edge”.

Anyway, it looks like 2.1 is on the horizon, which means lots of updates as they get to pushing it out the door. Here are some of the awesome new features:

Timestamped migrations

Migrations will soon have a UTC timestamp instead of a number, so it’ll be much easier to merge in branches and fix your migrations without errors.

named_scope

named_scope is a way of providing association-like scopes to your models, so you can define things like

named_scope :visible, :conditions => { :visible => true }

User.visible.find :first

which, in my opinion, is much better than with_scope, because it helps you to look for a method called ‘visible’ rather than “find_visible”, which is some nasty meta guff.

Dirty field checking

You’ll be able to check, and commit, changes to single fields, rather than updating entire rows. This is still shiny-new, and I haven’t had a chance to use it yet, but here’s a sample from the feature’s tests:

person.name = 'a'
assert person.name_changed?

config.gem

You can specify which gems are required by your application in the “config” section. The extra bonus with this is the new rake task, rake gems:install which will automagically install the required gems for you. Seriously, this is freakin’ awesome.

Ripped from the CHANGELOG:

Rails::Initializer.run do |config| 
   config.gems "bj" 
   config.gems "hpricot", :version => '0.6', :source => "http://code.whytheluckystiff.net" 
   config.gems "aws-s3", :lib => "aws/s3" 
 end        

rake gems # lists gems
rake gems:install  # Install all required gems: 
rake gems:unpack GEM=bj # Unpack specified gem to vendor/gems/gem_name-x.x.x

Gems can be plugins

If your plugin has the file, rails/init.rb, it will now work cleanly as a plugin.

OpenID plugin updated

The OpenID auth plugin now uses version 2 of the gem, which is a major leap forward.

Massive documentation patch

Pratik’s rails-documentation github project is certainly a lively one; look forward to some Doc Project updates over the coming weeks on this front. Now that Rails core has some more, dedicated doc-loving committers, Rails docs will be progressing at a major pace.

Phew. What an update! The upgrade from 2.0.2 to 2.1 will certainly be an interesting one for us all.

Oh, and Ryan? Scoop!