We’ve reviewed, committed, and scored the patch flood. Congratulations to our twenty RailsConf 2007 Hackfest winners. Truly, a crack team of Rails commandos.

Over 24 days, we saw 263 participants open 462 tickets, submit 527 patches, and make 3169 comments. Great show, all — see you at RailsConf!

Scott Raymond latest book, Ajax on Rails, has recently been published by O’Reilly. He also wrote What’s New in Prototype 1.5? on XML.com regarding the latest changes for Prototype 1.5.

• The book demonstrates how to use Ajax and Rails to build
  high-performance, scalable applications without having to write reams of
  difficult-to-maintain JavaScript code.
• Provides a thorough, low-level understanding of what’s under the hood,
  with a high-level understanding of how to use Ajax techniques
  effectively.
• Includes a complete reference to Prototype 1.5 and script.aculo.us 1.6.1,
  which can be used even outside of the Rails platform.
• Three fully worked out applications—a quiz program, a photo gallery,
  and a workgroup collaboration tool—show how everything fits together
  in practice.

— taken from the book’s Full Description

To coincide with Rails 1.2.1, Zed just made Mongrel 1.0.1 official. He also points out that he started working on Mongrel around January, making it around 1 year old too. Congrats to Zed and everyone else that contributed to the application and to the wonderful Mongrel community.

Rob Orsini released the new Rails Cookbook from O’Reilly, just in time for Rails 1.2. Just from looking at the table of contents, it looks like there’s a lot of good information packed in this book.

This book is packed with the solutions you need to be proficient
developer with Rails, the leading framework for building the new
generation of Web 2.0 applications. Recipes range from the basics,
like installing Rails and setting up your development environment, to
the latest techniques, such as developing RESTful web services. Each
recipe includes a tested solution, plus a discussion of how and why
it works. — from the book’s Full Description

Since we’re all celebrating new releases, it seems only fair to point out that Haml, an alternative markup format to Rails’ RHTML templates, has reached the lofty version of 1.0. It even comes with a plugin for seamless integration with Rails applications, so you really have no excuse not to give it a try. If you’re looking for an alternative to RHTML, Haml may just be you. Check it out!

Prototype 1.5 shipped together with Rails 1.2 today. But that’s not all that’s been happening at the JavaScript sugar mill. Today also marks the official unveiling of prototypejs.org. A brand new site dedicated to promoting and teaching Prototype. It comes complete with API documentation, a blog, and a guide on how to contribute. Congratulations to Sam, Justin, and the rest of the team behind the site.

Get out your party balloons and funny hats because we’re there, baby. Yes, sire, Rails 1.2 is finally available in all it’s glory. It took a little longer than we initially anticipated to get everything lined up (and even then we had a tiny snag that bumped us straight from 1.2.0 to 1.2.1 before this announcement even had time to be written).

So hopefully it’s been worth the wait. Who am I kidding. Of course it’s been worth the wait. We got the RESTful flavor with new encouragement for resource-oriented architectures. We’re taking mime types, HTTP status codes, and multiple representations of the same resource serious. And of course there’s the international pizzazz of multibyte-safe UTF-8 wrangling.

That’s just some of the headliner features. On top of that, there’s an absolutely staggering amount of polish being dished out. The CHANGELOG for Action Pack alone contains some two hundred entries. Active Record has another 170-something on top of that.

All possible due to the amazing work of our wonderful and glorious community. People from all over the world doing their bit, however big or small, to increase the diameter of your smile. That’s love, people.

As always, you get a hold of the latest and greatest through gems:

…or if you prefer to freeze it straight up, you can:

If you go with the gems, remember to change your version binding in config/environment.rb. Otherwise, you’ll still be tied to whatever old version you were using before.

Do note, though, that this is a massive upgrade. A few major components of Rails were left for scraps and entirely rewritten (routing and auto-loading included). We’ve tried our very best to remain backwards compatible. We’ve run multiple release candidate sessions to everyone help achieve that goal.

But it may not be perfect — heck, what is — so you’d be best advised to give your application a full and thorough work-out before contemplating a deployment. But of course, you’ve been such a good little tester bee that all what is needed is a single “rake” to see if everything passes, right?

How to get started learning all about Rails 1.2

With the fanfare out of the way, I point your attention to a rerun of the RC1 release notes on the new features. This rerun only contains the highlights, though. Real fans will want to peruse the CHANGELOGs themselves from the API.

For everyone else, there’s of course also the much easier path of just picking up the second edition of Agile Web Development with Rails. This edition was written to be spot on with 1.2 and contains a lot more elaborate guidance than you’ll find in the CHANGELOGs.

So it’s no wonder that the 2nd edition sold out the 15,000 copies of the first print run in a mere three weeks. Rest assured, though, the second run should already be available in stores. And for instant gratification, nothing beats picking up the PDF+Book combo off the Pragmatic book site.

REST and Resources

REST, and general HTTP appreciation, is the star of Rails 1.2. The bulk of these features were originally introduced to the general public in my RailsConf keynote on the subject. Give that a play to get into the mindset of why REST matters for Rails.

Then start thinking about how your application could become more RESTful. How you too can transform that 15-action controller into 2-3 new controllers each embracing a single resource with CRUDing love. This is where the biggest benefit is hidden: A clear approach to controller-design that’ll reduce complexity for the implementer and result in an application that behaves as a much better citizen on the general web.

To help the transition along, we have a scaffold generator that’ll create a stub CRUD interface, just like the original scaffolder, but in a RESTful manner. You can try it out with “script/generate scaffold_resource”. Left with no arguments like that, you get a brief introduction to how it works and what’ll create.

The only real API element that binds all this together is the new map.resources, which is used instead of map.connect to wire a resource-based controller for HTTP verb love. Then, once you have a resource-loving controller, you can link with our verb-emulation link link_to "Destroy", post_url(post), :method => :delete. Again, running the resource scaffolder will give you a feel for how it all works.

Formats and respond_to

While respond_to has been with us since Rails 1.1, we’ve added a small tweak in 1.2 that ends up making a big difference for immediate usefulness of the feature. That is the magic of :format. All new applications will have one additional default route: map.connect ':controller/:action/:id.:format'. With this route installed, imagine the following example:

Using the Accept header to accomplish this is no longer necessary. That makes everything a lot easier. You can explore your API in the browser just by adding .xml to an URL. You don’t need a before_filter to look for clues of a newsreader, just use .rss. And all of them automatically works with page and action caching.

Of course, this format-goodness plays extra well together with map.resources, which automatically makes sure everything Just Works. The resource-scaffold generator even includes an example for this using format.xml, so /posts/5.xml is automatically wired up. Very nifty!

Multibyte

Unicode ahoy! While Rails has always been able to store and display unicode with no beef, it’s been a little more complicated to truncate, reverse, or get the exact length of a UTF-8 string. You needed to fool around with KCODE yourself and while plenty of people made it work, it wasn’t as plug’n’play easy as you could have hoped (or perhaps even expected).

So since Ruby won’t be multibyte-aware until this time next year, Rails 1.2 introduces ActiveSupport::Multibyte for working with Unicode strings. Call the chars method on your string to start working with characters instead of bytes.

Imagine the string ‘€2.99’. If we manipulate it at a byte-level, it’s easy to get broken dreams:

The € character takes three bytes. So not only can’t you easily byte-manipulate it, but String#first and TextHelper#truncate used to choke too. In the old days, this would happen:

With Rails 1.2, you of course get:

TextHelper#truncate/excerpt and String#at/from/to/first/last automatically does the .chars conversion, but if when you need to manipulate or display length yourself, be sure to call .chars. Like:

With Rails 1.2, we’re assuming that you want to play well with unicode out the gates. The default charset for action renderings is therefore also UTF-8 (you can set another with ActionController::Base.default_charset=(encoding)). KCODE is automatically set to UTF-8 as well.

Watch the screencast. (but note that manually setting the KCODE is no longer necessary)

Unicode was in greatest demand, but Multibyte is ready handle other encodings (say, Shift-JIS) as they are implemented. Please extend Multibyte for the encodings you use.

Thanks to Manfred Stienstra, Julian Tarkhanov, Thijs van der Vossen, Jan Behrens, and (others?) for creating this library.

Routes

Action Pack has an all new implementation of Routes that’s both faster and more secure, but it’s also a little stricter. Semicolons and periods are separators, so a /download/:file route which used to match /download/history.txt doesn’t work any more. Use :requirements => { :file => /.*/ } to match the period.

Auto-loading

We’ve fixed a bug that allowed libraries from Ruby’s standard library to be auto-loaded on reference. Before, if you merely reference the Pathname constant, we’d autoload pathname.rb. No more, you’ll need to manually require 'pathname' now.

We’ve also improved the handling of module loading, which means that a reference for Accounting::Subscription will look for app/models/accounting/subscription.rb. At the same time, that means that merely referencing Subscription will not look for subscription.rb in any subdir of app/models. Only app/models/subscription.rb will be tried. If you for some reason depended on this, you can still get it back by adding app/models/accounting to config.load_paths in config/environment.rb.

Prototype

To better comply with the HTML spec, Prototype’s Ajax-based forms no longer serialize disabled form elements. Update your code if you rely on disabled field submission.

For consistency Prototype’s Element and Field methods no longer take an arbitrary number of arguments. This means you need to update your code if you use Element.toggle, Element.show, Element.hide, Field.clear, and Field.present in hand-written JavaScript (the Prototype helpers have been updated to automatically generate the correct thing).

// if you have code that looks like this
Element.show('page', 'sidebar', 'content');
// you need to replace it with code like this
['page', 'sidebar', 'content'].each(Element.show);

Action Mailer

All emails are MIME version 1.0 by default, so you’ll have to update your mailer unit tests: @expected.mime_version = '1.0'

Deprecation

Since Rails 1.0 we’ve kept a stable, backward-compatible API, so your apps can move to new releases without much work. Some of that API now feels like our freshman 15 so we’re going on a diet to trim the fat. Rails 1.2 deprecates a handful of features which now have superior alternatives or are better suited as plugins.

Deprecation isn’t a threat, it’s a promise! These features will be entirely gone in Rails 2.0. You can keep using them in 1.2, but you’ll get a wag of the finger every time: look for unsightly deprecation warnings in your test results and in your log files.

Treat your 1.0-era code to some modern style. To get started, just run your tests and tend to the warnings.

Pat Eyler is running a Ruby blogging contest, sponsored by Apress, and the first month’s topic is Rails Revelations: How Rails made me a better programmmer. Read the requirements at that post, and then write up your article and post a link to it in the comments here. Pat Eyler, Apress editor Jason Gilmore, and Jarkko Laine will judge the entries, picking a winner in February. Go to it!

Ah, Portland. The open-source motherland. Pacific springtime beauty. RailsConf ’07 nirvana.rb # => true and home of CD Baby, a little record store that digs Ruby and Rails.

We’re gearing up for a RailsConf hackfest at the Jupiter hotel just down the street and figured, heck, let’s start now! The top twenty Rails contributors between the new year and conference registration opening day will have a free conf pass and a room at the Jupiter specially reserved, CD Baby’s treat.

No kidding. Registration opens in a matter of weeks. Sprint!

Rails contribution is measured by real Trac activity weighted in favor of well-tested, committed patches but also accounts for new tickets and even comments. We’re joining forces with Working With Rails to track Rails contributions from the new year onward. To be included, mark yourself as a core contributor and give your Trac username in your account profile.

Have a Rails itch you’ve longed to scratch? Now’s the time! Happy hacking, and see you at RailsConf.

Update: Derek @ CD Baby’s announcement with more details.

Update: I announced contest close on the opening day of registration but Derek announced an earlier deadline on January 22nd. Sorry for the confusion! To draw a reasonable compromise, the contest closes tonight, January 24th, at midnight PST. (That’s 2007-01-25 08:00:00 UTC.) After the contest closes, we’ll continue scoring the backlog of patches submitted before the deadline then announce the winners this weekend.

So far, 258 participants have opened 443 tickets, submitted 501 patches, and made 2976 changes. Congratulations! And the leaderboard’s still tight with 17 hours to go..

Update: the contest has closed. The winners are..

I’ve been remiss in announcing recent Capistrano releases, so I’m making up for lost time now. Capistrano 1.3.1 is now available!

Capistrano, for those of you that are late to the game, is a utility for executing commands in parallel on multiple remote machines. It comes with support for vastly simplifying the deployment process of Rails applications, but can be customized to work with virtually any environment.

Since 1.2.0, the following enhancements and changes have been made:

• You can encode the username and port for a host in the host string. Does one machine require a different user than another? A non-standard port for SSH access? It’s as simple as:

role :app,  "app1.host.com"
role :web,  "webuser@web1.host.com"
role :db,   "db1.host.com:1234"
role :file, "fileuser@file1.host.com:1234"

• You can pass an :as option to sudo, to specify which user a command should be run as:

sudo "spinner", :as => "app"

• If you define a “.caprc” file in your home directory, Capistrano will automatically load that file on every invocation. (It has the same format as any other Capistrano recipe file.)
• Assets in the images, javascripts, and stylesheets directories are now touched after updating the code, to ensure that Rails’ asset timestamping feature works correctly.
• Make sure new setups and checkouts are group-writable.
• Do not run the cleanup task on servers marked “no_release”.
• Rake integration is now deprecated. You should be invoking ‘cap’ directly. A future release will remove rake integration altogether.

Feel free to read the changelog several other fixes and tweaks. It might be a few hours before the 1.3.1 gem reaches all the mirrors, but when it gets there, a simple “gem install capistrano” ought to do the trick!