Announcements : Instant Rails 2.0 Released on 28th December 2007

Rob Bazinet has announced on 28/12/07 the release of Instant Rails 2.0. This is his first release after taking over the project for Curt Hibbs.

This release is part of bringing the environment up-to-date, no earth shattering changes but the following is updated:
- Ruby 1.8.6 Patch Level 111 with tons of bug fixes and new updated gems
- Ruby on Rails 2.0.2
- RubyGems 1.0.1
- Rake 0.8.0
- Mongrel 1.1.2
- SQLite3

Instant Rails 2.0 can be downloaded from RubyForge now<http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=904>

For the Release Notes, go to <http://instantrails.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?Release_Notes_For_Instant_Rails_2.0>to see all the updates.

Questions should be submitted to the Instant Rails list <http://rubyforge.org/mail/?group_id=904>


-Rob Bazinet http://www.accidentaltechnologist.com/

Announcements : Rails 2.0.2 Released on 17 December 2007

Quoted Verbatim from DHH

Now that we have the big Rails 2.0 release out the door, it’s a lot easier to push out smaller updates more frequently. So that’s what we’re going to do. Rails 2.0.2 contains a bunch of smaller fixes to various bugs, no show-stopping action, just further polish. But it also contains a few new defaults.

SQLite3 is the new default database

Most importantly is SQLite3 as the new database we’ll configure for by default when you run the rails generation command without any specification. This change comes as SQLite3 is simply an easier out of the box experience than MySQL. There’s no fussing with GRANTs and creates, the database is just there. This is especially so under OS X 10.5 Leopard, which ships with SQLite3 and the driver gems preinstalled as part of the development kit.

If you want to preconfigure your database for MySQL (or any of the other adapters), you simply do “rails -d mysql myapp” and everything is the same as before. But if you’re just playing with a new application or building a smallish internal tool, then I strongly recommend having a look at SQLite3. Thanks to the agnostic db/schema.rb, it’s as easy as changing your config/database.yml to switch from SQLite3 to MySQL (or another database) as soon as your load warrants it.

Don’t check for template changes in production mode

New applications will be generated with the following option in their config/environments/production.rb:

config.action_view.cache_template_loading = trueThis will stop Rails from constantly doing STAT calls to the file system to check if the file has changed. This can make for a lot of I/O activity, especially if you have lots of partials. If you have very fast disks, this may not matter, but if you’re running off slower disks it can make quite a big difference.

The drawback is that you can no longer just svnup a single template file and see it changed immediately. You’ll have to restart the application servers to make that happen.

Regardless, we feel that this is the better default in a partial-heavy world, but you’re of course always free to change it.

Rails 2.0.2 is a drop-in replacement for Rails 2.0

To upgrade, just do “gem install rails” (if the gems are still not propagated, use—source http://gems.rubyonrails.org) or use the new rel_2-0-2 tag.

The rest of the changes are as follows:

Action Pack

Added delete_via_redirect and put_via_redirect to integration testing #10497 [philodespotos]

Allow headers[‘Accept’] to be set by hand when calling xml_http_request #10461 [BMorearty]

Added OPTIONS to list of default accepted HTTP methods #10449 [holoway]

Added option to pass proc to ActionController::Base.asset_host for maximum configurability #10521 [chuyeow]. Example:
ActionController::Base.asset_host = Proc.new { source if source.starts_with?(’/images’) “http://images.example.com” else “http://assets.example.com” end }

Fixed that ActionView#file_exists? would be incorrect if @first_render is set #10569 [dbussink]

Added that Array#to_param calls to_param on all it’s elements #10473 [brandon]

Ensure asset cache directories are automatically created. #10337 [Josh Peek, Cheah Chu Yeow]

render :xml and :json preserve custom content types. #10388 [jmettraux, Cheah Chu Yeow]

Refactor Action View template handlers. #10437, #10455 [Josh Peek]

Fix DoubleRenderError message and leave out mention of returning false from filters. Closes #10380 [Frederick Cheung]

Clean up some cruft around ActionController::Base#head. Closes #10417 [ssoroka]

Active Record

Ensure optimistic locking handles nil #lock_version values properly. Closes #10510 [rick]

Make the Fixtures Test::Unit enhancements more supporting for double-loaded test cases. Closes #10379 [brynary]

Fix that validates_acceptance_of still works for non-existent tables (useful for bootstrapping new databases). Closes #10474 [hasmanyjosh]

Ensure that the :uniq option for has_many :through associations retains the order. #10463 [remvee]

Base.exists? doesn’t rescue exceptions to avoid hiding SQL errors. #10458 [Michael Klishin]

Documentation: Active Record exceptions, destroy_all and delete_all. #10444, #10447 [Michael Klishin]

Active Resource

Added more specific exceptions for 400, 401, and 403 (all descending from ClientError so existing rescues will work) #10326 [trek]

Correct empty response handling. #10445 [seangeo]

Active Support

Ruby 1.9 compatibility. #1689, #10466, #10468 [Cheah Chu Yeow, Pratik Naik, Jeremy Kemper]

TimeZone#to_s uses UTC rather than GMT. #1689 [Cheah Chu Yeow]

Refactor of Hash#symbolize_keys! to use Hash#replace. Closes #10420 [ReinH]

Fix HashWithIndifferentAccess#to_options! so it doesn’t clear the options hash. Closes #10419 [ReinH]

Rails

Changed the default database from mysql to sqlite3, so now running “rails myapp” will have a config/database.yml that’s setup for SQLite3 (which in OS X Leopard is installed by default, so is the gem, so everything Just Works with no database configuration at all). To get a Rails application preconfigured for MySQL, just run “rails -d mysql myapp” [DHH]

Turned on ActionView::Base.cache_template_loading by default in config/environments/production.rb to prevent file system stat calls for every template loading to see if it changed (this means that you have to restart the application to see template changes in production mode) [DHH]

Introduce `rake secret` to output a crytographically secure secret key for use with cookie sessions #10363 [revans]

Fixed that local database creation should consider 127.0.0.1 local #9026 [parcelbrat]

Fixed that functional tests generated for scaffolds should use fixture calls instead of hard-coded IDs #10435 [boone]

Added db:migrate:redo and db:migrate:reset for rerunning existing migrations #10431, #10432 [matt]

RAILS_GEM_VERSION may be double-quoted also. #10443 [James Cox]

Update rails:freeze:gems to work with RubyGems 0.9.5. [Jeremy Kemper]

Announcements : Rails 2.0.1 has been released on 7th December 2007

As quoted by DHH verbatim, Rails 2.0 is finally finished after about a year in the making. This is a fantastic release that’s absolutely stuffed with great new features, loads of fixes, and an incredible amount of polish. We’ve even taken a fair bit of cruft out to make the whole package more coherent and lean.

What’s new ?

Action Pack: Resources
This is where the bulk of the action for 2.0 has gone. We’ve got a slew of improvements to the RESTful lifestyle. First, we’ve dropped the semicolon for custom methods instead of the regular slash. So /people/1;edit is now /people/1/edit.

We’ve also added the namespace feature to routing resources that makes it really easy to confine things like admin interfaces:map.namespace(:admin) do admin
admin.resources :products,
:collection => { :inventory => :get },
:member => { :duplicate => :post },
:has_many => [ :tags, :images, :variants ]
end

Which will give you named routes like inventory_admin_products_url and admin_product_tags_url.

To keep track of this named routes proliferation, we’ve added the “rake routes” task, which will list all the named routes created by routes.rb.

We’ve also instigated a new convention that all resource-based controllers will be plural by default. This allows a single resource to be mapped in multiple contexts and still refer to the same controller. Example:
# /avatars/45 => AvatarsController#show
map.resources :avatars
# /people/5/avatar => AvatarsController#show
map.resources :people, :has_one => :avatar

Action Pack: Multiview
Alongside the improvements for resources come improvements for multiview.

We already have #respond_to, but we’ve taken it a step further and made it dig into the templates. We’ve separated the format of the template from its rendering engine.

So show.rhtml now becomes show.html.erb, which is the template that’ll be rendered by default for a show action that has declared format.html in its respond_to. And you can now have something like show.csv.erb, which targets text/csv, but also uses the default ERB renderer.

So the new format for templates is action.format.renderer. A few examples:
show.erb: same show template for all formats
index.atom.builder: uses the Builder format, previously known as rxml, to render an index action for the application/atom+xml mime type
edit.iphone.haml: uses the custom HAML template engine (not included by default) to render an edit action for the custom Mime::IPHONE format

Speaking of the iPhone, we’ve made it easier to declare “fake” types that are only used for internal routing. Like when you want a special HTML interface just for an iPhone. All it takes is something like this:
# should go in config/initializers/mime_types.rb
Mime.register_alias "text/html", :iphone
class ApplicationController < format =" :iphone">

Action Pack: Record identification
Piggy-backing off the new drive for resources are a number of simplifications for controller and view methods that deal with URLs.

We’ve added a number of conventions for turning model classes into resource routes on the fly. Examples:
# person is a Person object, which by convention will
# be mapped to person_url for lookup
redirect_to(person)
link_to(person.name, person)
form_for(person)

Action Pack: HTTP Loving
As you might have gathered, Action Pack in Rails 2.0 is all about getting closer with HTTP and all its glory. Resources, multiple representations, but there’s more.

We’ve added a new module to work with HTTP Basic Authentication, which turns out to be a great way to do API authentication over SSL. It’s terribly simple to use. Here’s an example (there are more in ActionController::HttpAuthentication):
class PostsController < password = "dhh" except =""> [ :index ]
def index
render :text => "Everyone can see me!"
end
def edit
render :text => "I'm only accessible if you know the password"
end
private

def authenticate
authenticate_or_request_with_http_basic do user_name, password
user_name == USER_NAME && password == PASSWORD
end
end
end

We’ve also made it much easier to structure your JavaScript and stylesheet files in logical units without getting clobbered by the HTTP overhead of requesting a bazillion files. Using javascript_include_tag(:all, :cache => true) will turn public/javascripts/.js into a single public/javascripts/all.js file in production, while still keeping the files separate in development, so you can work iteratively without clearing the cache.

Along the same lines, we’ve added the option to cheat browsers who don’t feel like pipelining requests on their own. If you set ActionController::Base.asset_host = “assets%d.example.com”, we’ll automatically distribute your asset calls (like image_tag) to asset1 through asset4. That allows the browser to open many more connections at a time and increases the perceived speed of your application.

Action Pack: Security
Making it even easier to create secure applications out of the box is always a pleasure and with Rails 2.0 we’re doing it from a number of fronts. Most importantly, we now ship we a built-in mechanism for dealing with CRSF attacks.

By including a special token in all forms and Ajax requests, you can guard from having requests made from outside of your application. All this is turned on by default in new Rails 2.0 applications and you can very easily turn it on in your existing applications using ActionController::Base.protect_from_forgery (see ActionController::RequestForgeryProtection for more).

We’ve also made it easier to deal with XSS attacks while still allowing users to embed HTML in your pages. The old TextHelper#sanitize method has gone from a black list (very hard to keep secure) approach to a white list approach. If you’re already using sanitize, you’ll automatically be granted better protection. You can tweak the tags that are allowed by default with sanitize as well. See TextHelper#sanitize for details.

Finally, we’ve added support for HTTP only cookies. They are not yet supported by all browsers, but you can use them where they are.

Action Pack: Exception handling
Lots of common exceptions would do better to be rescued at a shared level rather than per action. This has always been possible by overwriting rescue_action_in_public, but then you had to roll out your own case statement and call super. Bah. So now we have a class level macro called rescue_from, which you can use to declaratively point certain exceptions to a given action.

Example:
class PostsController < with =""> :deny_access
protected
def deny_access
...
end
end

Action Pack: Cookie store sessions
The default session store in Rails 2.0 is now a cookie-based one.

That means sessions are no longer stored on the file system or in the database, but kept by the client in a hashed form that can’t be forged. This makes it not only a lot faster than traditional session stores, but also makes it zero maintenance. There’s no cron job needed to clear out the sessions and your server won’t crash because you forgot and suddenly had 500K files in tmp/session.

This setup works great if you follow best practices and keep session usage to a minimum, such as the common case of just storing a user_id and a the flash. If, however, you are planning on storing the nuclear launch codes in the session, the default cookie store is a bad deal. While they can’t be forged (so is_admin = true is fine), their content can be seen. If that’s a problem for your application, you can always just switch back to one of the traditional session stores (but first investigate that requirement as a code smell).

Action Pack: New request profiler
Figuring out where your bottlenecks are with real usage can be tough, but we just made it a whole lot easier with the new request profiler that can follow an entire usage script and report on the aggregate findings. You use it like this:
$ cat login_session.rb
get_with_redirect '/'
say "GET / => #{path}"
post_with_redirect '/sessions', :username => 'john', :password => 'doe'
say "POST /sessions => #{path}"
$ ./script/performance/request -n 10 login_session.rb
And you get a thorough breakdown in HTML and text on where time was spent and you’ll have a good idea on where to look for speeding up the application.

Action Pack: Miscellaneous
Also of note is AtomFeedHelper, which makes it even simpler to create Atom feeds using an enhanced Builder syntax. Simple example:
# index.atom.builder:
atom_feed do feed
feed.title("My great blog!")
feed.updated((@posts.first.created_at))
for post in @posts
feed.entry(post) do entry
entry.title(post.title)
entry.content(post.body, :type => 'html')
entry.author do author
author.name("DHH")
end
end
end
end

We’ve made a number of performance improvements, so asset tag calls are now much cheaper and we’re caching simple named routes, making them much faster too.

Finally, we’ve kicked out in_place_editor and autocomplete_for into plugins that live on the official Rails SVN.

Active Record: Performance
Active Record has seen a gazillion fixes and small tweaks, but it’s somewhat light on big new features.

Something new that we have added, though, is a very simple Query Cache, which will recognize similar SQL calls from within the same request and return the cached result. This is especially nice for N+1 situations that might be hard to handle with :include or other mechanisms. We’ve also drastically improved the performance of fixtures, which makes most test suites based on normal fixture use be 50-100% faster.

Active Record: Sexy migrations
There’s a new alternative format for declaring migrations in a slightly more efficient format.

Before you’d write:
create_table :people do t
t.column, "account_id", :integer
t.column, "first_name", :string, :null => false
t.column, "last_name", :string, :null => false
t.column, "description", :text
t.column, "created_at", :datetime
t.column, "updated_at", :datetime
end

Now you can write:
create_table :people do t
t.integer :account_id
t.string :first_name, :last_name, :null => false
t.text :description
t.timestamps
end

Active Record: Foxy fixtures
The fixtures in Active Record has taken a fair amount of flak lately. One of the key points in that criticism has been the work with declaring dependencies between fixtures. Having to relate fixtures through the ids of their primary keys is no fun. That’s been addressed now and you can write fixtures like this:
# sellers.yml
shopify:
name: Shopify
# products.yml
pimp_cup:
seller: shopify
name: Pimp cup

As you can see, it’s no longer necessary to declare the ids of the fixtures and instead of using seller_id to refer to the relationship, you just use seller and the name of the fixture.

Active Record: XML in, JSON out
Active Record has supported serialization to XML for a while. In 2.0 we’ve added deserialization too, so you can say Person.new.from_xml(“David“) and get what you’d expect. We’ve also added serialization to JSON, which supports the same syntax as XML serialization (including nested associations). Just do person.to_json and you’re ready to roll.

Active Record: Shedding some weight
To make Active Record a little leaner and meaner, we’ve removed the acts_as_XYZ features and put them into individual plugins on the Rails SVN repository. So say you’re using acts_as_list, you just need to do ./script/plugin install acts_as_list and everything will move along like nothing ever happened.

A little more drastic, we’ve also pushed all the commercial database adapters into their own gems. So Rails now only ships with adapters for MySQL, SQLite, and PostgreSQL. These are the databases that we have easy and willing access to test on. But that doesn’t mean the commercial databases are left out in the cold. Rather, they’ve now been set free to have an independent release schedule from the main Rails distribution. And that’s probably a good thing as the commercial databases tend to require a lot more exceptions and hoop jumping on a regular basis to work well.

The commercial database adapters now live in gems that all follow the same naming convention: activerecord-XYZ-adapter. So if you gem install activerecord-oracle-adapter, you’ll instantly have Oracle available as an adapter choice in all the Rails applications on that machine. You won’t have to change a single line in your applications to take use of it.
That also means it’ll be easier for new database adapters to gain traction in the Rails world. As long as you package your adapter according to the published conventions, users just have to install the gem and they’re ready to roll.

Active Record: with_scope with a dash of syntactic vinegar
ActiveRecord::Base.with_scope has gone protected to discourage people from misusing it in controllers (especially in filters). Instead, it’s now encouraged that you only use it within the model itself. That’s what it was designed for and where it logically remains a good fit. But of course, this is all about encouraging and discouraging. If you’ve weighed the pros and the cons and still want to use with_scope outside of the model, you can always call it through .send(:with_scope).

ActionWebService out, ActiveResource in
It’ll probably come as no surprise that Rails has picked a side in the SOAP vs REST debate. Unless you absolutely have to use SOAP for integration purposes, we strongly discourage you from doing so. As a naturally extension of that, we’ve pulled ActionWebService from the default bundle. It’s only a gem install actionwebservice away, but it sends an important message none the less.

At the same time, we’ve pulled the new ActiveResource framework out of beta and into the default bundle. ActiveResource is like ActiveRecord, but for resources. It follows a similar API and is configured to Just Work with Rails applications using the resource-driven approach. For example, a vanilla scaffold will be accessible by ActiveResource.

ActiveSupport
There’s not all that much new in ActiveSupport. We’ve a host of new methods like Array#rand for getting a random element from an array, Hash#except to filter down a hash from undesired keys and lots of extensions for Date. We also made testing a little nicer with assert_difference. Short of that, it’s pretty much just fixes and tweaks.

Action Mailer
This is a very modest update for Action Mailer. Besides a handful of bug fixes, we’ve added the option to register alternative template engines and assert_emails to the testing suite, which works like this:
Assert number of emails delivered within a block: assert_emails 1 do post :signup, :name => ‘Jonathan’ end

Rails: The debugger is back
To tie it all together, we have a stream of improvements for Rails in general. My favorite amongst these is the return of the breakpoint in form of the debugger. It’s a real debugger too, not just an IRB dump. You can step back and forth, list your current position, and much more. It’s all coming from the gracious note of the ruby-debug gem. So you’ll have to install that for the new debugger to work.

To use the debugger, you just install the gem, put “debugger” somewhere in your application, and then start the server with—debugger or -u. When the code executes the debugger command, you’ll have it available straight in the terminal running the server. No need for script/breakpointer or anything else. You can use the debugger in your tests too.

Rails: Clean up your environment
Before Rails 2.0, config/environment.rb files every where would be clogged with all sorts of one-off configuration details.

Now you can gather those elements in self-contained files and put them under config/initializers and they’ll automatically be loaded. New Rails 2.0 applications ship with two examples in form of inflections.rb (for your own pluralization rules) and mime_types.rb (for your own mime types). This should ensure that you need to keep nothing but the default in config/environment.rb.

Rails: Easier plugin order
Now that we’ve yanked out a fair amount of stuff from Rails and into plugins, you might well have other plugins that depend on this functionality. This can require that you load, say, acts_as_list before your own acts_as_extra_cool_list plugin in order for the latter to extend the former.

Before, this required that you named all your plugins in config.plugins. Major hassle when all you wanted to say was “I only care about acts_as_list being loaded before everything else”. Now you can do exactly that with config.plugins = [ :acts_as_list, :all ].
And hundreds upon hundreds of other improvements

What I’ve talked about above is but a tiny sliver of the full 2.0 package. We’ve got literally hundreds of bug fixes, tweaks, and feature enhancements crammed into Rails 2.0. All this coming off the work of tons of eager contributors working tirelessly to improve the framework in small, but important ways.
I encourage you to scourger the CHANGELOGs and learn more about all that changed.

So how do I upgrade?
If you want to move your application to Rails 2.0, you should first move it to Rails 1.2.6. That’ll include deprecation warnings for most everything we yanked out in 2.0. So if your application runs fine on 1.2.6 with no deprecation warnings, there’s a good chance that it’ll run straight up on 2.0. Of course, if you’re using, say, pagination, you’ll need to install the classic_pagination plugin. If you’re using Oracle, you’ll need to install the activerecord-oracle-adapter gem. And so on and so forth for all the extractions.

So how do I install?
To install through gems, do:gem install rails -y
...if you’re having trouble with that (gem not found), just grab gems from our own repository in the meanwhile:gem install rails -y --source http://gems.rubyonrails.org/

To try it from an SVN tag, use (you may need to run this command twice depending on your current Rails version):rake rails:freeze:edge TAG=rel_2-0-1

Note: It’s 2.0.1 because we found a small issue just after we pushed 2.0.0.