Rails Core Weekly July 16 - August 6
Rails Core Weekly summarizes the rails-core mailing list, a list dedicated to Ruby on Rails internals and its development. RCW is brought to you by Rodney Ramdas and proofread by the good people of The Caboose (http://blog.caboo.se/) for accuracy. RSS feed and RCW home: http://www.pinupgeek.com/articles/category/rails-core-weekly-news The ruby on rails podcast by Michael Genereux supposedly now includes RCW: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=163609703&s=143452 ==PLUG== Caboose (spec. Court3nay) has started an Rails documentation projecct to fund someone to improve the Rails API documentation.The initial goal of 5000 USD has already been reached but you can still participate especially if you are currently making your living with Rails programming. Head on down to: http://www.caboo.se/articles/2006/08/04/the-caboose-rails-documentation-project Here are some the more interesting threads of the last 21 days or so. [ thread: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/73013 ] Zach Dennis is optimizing AR. In Zach's words: "My main focus is getting AR to better handle inserts, updates and merges when working large sets of data. It can improve improve performance by 400% to 600% in preliminary benchmarks." The code that does that is here: http://blogs.mktec.com/zdennis/files/active_record_optimizations-0.0.1.tgz If you're interested in making things fly on mysql this is one thread you should definitely check out. [ http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/73899#new ] Shanti Braford is looking for a better solution the form_tag_remote with multipart file uploads. Ezra Zygmuntowicz recommends http://sean.treadway.info/svn/plugins/responds_to_parent/README which Chris MacGrath agrees works well. [ thread: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/74071#new ] Andrew Kaspick needs a way for plugins to play nice together. Ciao Chassot has a wonderful solution that uses the equally wonderful alias_method_chain. Be sure to check out his example. [ thread: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/74582#new ] Stephen Blackstone submits a patch that allows for databases to be defined in connection pools. You would write the usual connectiont to database.yml but then add development_read_pool: db1, db2, db3 development_write_pool: db1, db2, db3 A connection from the pool is then chosen using a round-robin scheme. Stephen does a superb job explaining his patch. Must-read thread. [thread: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/73617#new ] Bob Silva uncoveres the following curiosity when looking at AR dates: "Right now, if you shove a date like: 07/18/06 to Rails, MySQL will get 0006-07-16, but ParseDate.parsedate('07/18/06', true) will create the right 4-digit year." Jonathan Viney has a plugin that fixes this but Bob is still interested in people opinion on this issue. Shouldn't Rails also work without the date helpers ? [thread: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/74822#new ] Jonathan Viney wonders why has_one objects are re-saved when the parent is saved. He demonstrates this behaviour and provides a patch to fix this: class Person < ActiveRecord::Base has_one :user end class User < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :person end p = Person.find(:first) p.save # As expected, nothing happens with the user association p.user # Loads the associated object p.save # As well as saving the person, the user is saved as well. Seems unnecessary. If you're interested in dirty field checking, concurrency etc this is a very interesting thread to read. Turns out Jeremy Kemper at one point implemented dirty column tracking and Jamis did it on the object level. Also Jonathan seems to have written yet another plugin to make things work(acts_as_modified). [thread: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/75313#new ] Caio Chassot poses the question: "Do you really think it's a good idea to run filters more than once?" Besides from being able to use skip_* this thread discusses the ins and outs as well as performance benchmarks and the possibility of adding a uniq option to the filter chain. [thread: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/75353#new ] Rick Olson breaks the news that Simply Restful is now an integral part of core with some slight syntax changes: map.resource :comment, :path_prefix => '/posts/:post_id' map.resource :user map.resource :post becomes map.resources :comments, :path_prefix => '/posts/:post_id' map.resources :users, :posts [thread: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/75356#new ] There seems to be some problem with the new map.resources code though. Discussing the problem leads to a discussion about postbacks and REST. Josh Susser then coins the term "syntactic vinegar" in reference to the syntax proposed by DHH. But DHH actually likes syntactic vinegar: "I think syntactic vinegar is one of the best ways to encourage people to do the right thing." Another must-read thread. [thread: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/74111#new ] Daniel is wondering if :dependent would be a good idea in case an object has_many relations to not allow the parent to be destroyed if it has children. Daniel tries a patch and gets some great advise from Jeremy when Daniel runs into trouble when the order of his new restrict association turns out to be significant. Jeremy: "You can wrap the destroy method to leapfrog the callback chain." associations.rb, configure_dependency_* case reflection.options[:dependent] when :restrict class_eval <<-end_eval def destroy_with_has_many_#{reflection.name} unless #{reflection.name}.blank? raise DestroyRestricted.new(self, #{reflection.name.inspect}) end end alias_method_chain :destroy, "has_many_#{reflection.name}" end_eval # ... end base.rb module ActiveRecord class DestroyRestricted < ActiveRecordError def initialize(model, by) super "#{model.class.name} #{model.id} destroy restricted by #{by}" end end end [thread: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/75349#new ] Courtnay runs Rails with ruby 1.8.5 and comes across several issues which he of course patches. A rather funny thread about formatting ensues. What a single semi-colon can do ! [thread: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/74568#new ] Michael Koziarski comes up with plan how to start weeding out the soon-to-be unsupported and deprecated ways of doing things. http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/4623 offers a programmatic way of doing that with the deprecate() method/ [thread: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/75496#new ] Michael Schoen uncovers a performance issue with has_one associations and caching. DHH asks to PDI. [thread: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/75664#new ] Lars Pind give acts_as_nested_set some love i.e the ability to move a node within a tree. Courtnay then asks whether aans shouldn't move to a plugin. Dave Thomas pitches in and says he still can't make aans work for some of his book examples. DHH seconds that aans is among the thing to move out of core. Others on that list includes all the Ajax macros (in_place_editor etc), pagination, and possibly acts_as_list/acts_as_tree. [thread: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/76042#new ] The great Blake Watters has been using the sql "having" clause a lot and decided to extend AR to have :having option. Jeremy Kemper seems to like this idea provides feedback and some pointers. Blake also contemplates scoping to go with :having. [thread: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/76109#new ] Chris Abad suggests nested controllers might be useful but is not sure about how RESTful that would be. DHH suggests nesting is most certainly on the todo list. Jamis Buck suggests: map.resources :whatever_the_resources_are, :controller => "folder/controller" might do the trick for now. That it for, more soon. -- Rodney http://www.pinupgeek.com http://www.dutchrailers.org _______________________________________________ Rails-core mailing list Rails-core@lists.rubyonrails.org http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails-core
