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Rails 2.1 Is Now Available
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Jun 01, 2008 07:36 PM
from the blood-on-the-tracks dept.
from the blood-on-the-tracks dept.
slick50 writes "Rails 2.1 is now available for general consumption with all the features and fixes we've been putting in over the last six months since 2.0. We've had 1,400 contributors creating patches and vetting them. This has resulted in 1,600+ patches. And lots of that has made it into this release. The new major features are: time zones (by Geoff Buesing), dirty tracking, Gem dependencies, named scope (by Nick Kallen), UTC-based migrations, and better caching. As always, you can install with: gem install rails Or you can use the Git tag for 2.1.0."
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Microsoft Linking Silverlight, Ruby on Rails 232 comments
CWmike writes "Friday Microsoft will demonstrate integration between its new Silverlight browser plug-in and Ruby on Rails. Microsoft's John Lam, a program manager in the dynamic language runtime team, said in a recent blog item: 'Running Rails shows that we are serious when we say that we are going to create a Ruby that runs real Ruby programs. And there isn't a more real Ruby program than Rails.' Also at the event, Microsoft officials will demonstrate IronRuby, a version of the Ruby programming language for Microsoft's .Net platform, running a Ruby on Rails application."
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Internationalization (Score:2)
When I first looked at Rails years ago, it (and Ruby) had far less than adequate support for i18n. Has this changed at all? I'm sure there are some Rails devs here with experience in that.
Re:Internationalization (Score:5, Informative)
Time Zones in Rails 2.1
http://railscasts.com/episodes/106 [railscasts.com]
By 'i18n' you might be refering to Localization (languages, etc) though.
If you are bored, start at the beginning...
http://railscasts.com/episodes/1 [railscasts.com]
and keep stepping through to Episode 111. (some are older, some are new to 2.1)
Movies are all in MOV format, optionally in M4V.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
I love Ruby and Rails, don't get me wrong... (Score:5, Informative)
1) Have a
2) Read in a files written in a mix of UTF-8 and SJIS (a legacy Japanese encoding which is quite common here)
3) Do some really freaking simple text munging.
4) Write out to a new file in SJIS, for exporting to another system
Sixteen. Freaking. Hours.
Among the numerous issues I learned the hard way (previously all of my Rails experience had been in the mystical wonderland of ASCII and all of my i18n experience had been in Java, so I had never seen problems like this before):
1) Running regexps on strings. I naiively assumed that you could actually, you know, do it. As it turns out, you have to first convert the encoding of the regexp and the encoding of the string such that they match, otherwise you get program killing errors. This was sort of a newbie mistake -- I figured that Ruby, with its "keep it easy" credo, would do things fairly transparently like Java does. Instead, I have to manually identify all entrance points of text into the system, and do the encoding to UTF-8 internally there, then do the encoding to the target encoding at all the output points. As you can imagine, this isn't the world's most maintainable solution, since all it takes is one other member of my team to refactor a file and forget to include the magic encoding comment at the top (thus letting encoding fall to the system default) and then we've got little SJIS gremlins running around internally wreaking havoc with our data.
2) Try opening a file for writing as SJIS in a script written in UTF-8
output_file = File.open("sample.txt", "w:SJIS") #this is Ruby 1.9
output_file.puts Date.today.year # 2009
output_file.close
You'll get an error saying that you can't transcode between ASCII-8BIT (what the 2009 starts as, after it gets munged into a string) and SJIS, which you've declared as the file encoding. Never mind that a) the transcoding is bitwise identical in this case and b) yes, you freaking machine, I damn well CAN transcode between those two because if I can't then Japan is "#$"#ed.
3) Documentation. One of my favorite hobbyhorses with Rails, and I love that framework, is that documentation is sparse, outdated, and disorganized. Ruby 1.9 deals with the issue of sparse, outdated, and disorganized documentation by dispensing with it entirely, for minor features like Unicode support, which was theoretically the major advance. (Its possible I merely missed the documentation because my Japanese Google-fu is insufficient, but I really feel for those saps out there who need to support languages which aren't Japanese.)
About the only helpful things I found were blog posts and mailing list archives which detailed the somewhat idiosyncratic relationship between
a) the magic comment
b) the -K and -E command line parameters
c) the system default encoding
in determining what encoding strings actually end up as. I have still not been able to re-find where I learned about the File.open(filename, "w:SJIS") syntax. There does not appear to be any comprehensive official list of changes. Rather, the best I was able to do was a blog post featuring (I kid you not) the results of one guy grep'ping changelogs looking for things that looked related to 1.9 and collecting them in one place.
Oh boy, was Friday frustrating. And I get to do it again today. Fun stuff.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I love Ruby and Rails, don't get me wrong... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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Re:I love Ruby and Rails, don't get me wrong... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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Just having unicode strings is not enough to "support unicode". Can I sort a list of strings written in french with the built-in unicode libs in Ruby 1.9 ? no, they won't be sorted correctly. Can I do it with Java out of the box ? yes.
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/i18n/text/locale.html
The built in arrays sort in Java can take a collator and know how to sort an array of string in languages other than ASCII english.
Ruby 1.9 support for unicode is minimal. It just
Re: (Score:2)
" Just having unicode strings is not enough to "support unicode". Can I sort a list of strings written in french with the built-in unicode libs in Ruby 1.9 ? no, they won't be sorted correctly. Can I do it with Java out of the box ? yes.
That is a hopeless endeavor. It will screw up at least in Danish, where e.g. aa might be sorted first or last, depending on (meaning of) the word. I think we have even seen some court battles over whether Aabenraa (a town) gets to be to be first or late in the telephone book.
Better to sort in a predictabe, semi-correct way
And I am not defending ruby here, as I have not attempted to do i18n in ruby yet.
Re: (Score:2)
All the reencoding libraries are easy to use and you wont get the weird errors that the GP got.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
I havn't used it, but from what I've heard it works much like you'd expect gettext to.
Screencasts of New Features (Score:2, Informative)
Gem dependencies are awesome. RubyGems has been growing into a sweet package manager / deployment option and being able to easily handle gem dependencies is long overdue.
Psyched for Rails 2.1
Wt (Score:5, Informative)
I used to use Rails until I discovered Wt [webtoolkit.eu]: C++, Qt-like API, you develop webapps with widgets (as if they were a desktop application, no more "templates" or "pages") and you don't need to write a single line of HTML, CSS or Javascript. You can deploy it as a FastCGI module for Apache, Lighttp, etc, or as a standalone application with its own webserver. It supports very heavy loads, more than Rails or Django will ever be able to deal with. And you can link to a myriad of existing C and C++ libraries.
Do you want to authenticate your users using Active Directory? Use Samba and link to libwinbind if on Unix, or link to the Windows API if on Windows (yes, it's cross-platform!). No more worries about language bindings.
Re:Wt (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
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So, after the break-in, during the post-mortem... (Score:5, Insightful)
Skillz: "So they nailed you with SQL injection. There is no substitute for knowing WTF."
I'm not claiming that C/C++ are a great choice for web programming, merely bristling at the rejection as "unsafe".
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
So they nailed you with SQL injection.
Which can be protected against by either not using a SQL database at all -- depending on the app, a Document database [wikipedia.org] might be better. (I'm not sure yet what kind of app SQL would be more suited for.)
Or, more relevantly, by never inserting data into your SQL string in the first place. Use placeholder arguments instead, and prepare statements when you can.
And getting back on-topic, you could also use a framework which discourages using SQL at all, let alone SQL injection. Rails is a good start, there.
There is no substitute for knowing WTF.
It's
Re:So, after the break-in, during the post-mortem. (Score:2)
Don't trust any data input. Escape out user input, use prepare / execute....
Once again - The Alternatives: (Score:5, Informative)
Symfony [symfony-project.org]. PHP 5 Meta Framework using Propel and other layer components. The accompaning book (free PDF, buyable dead-tree) is a very good documentation.
Prado [pradosoft.com]. Event-Oriented PHP 5 Framework. Very interesting.
Code Igniter [codeigniter.com]. Lightweight PHP Framework for smaller stuff. Neat website.
Django [djangoproject.com]. Python Framework.
TurboGears [turbogears.org]. Python Meta Framework using some 3rd Party stuff like Templating layers and such.
Zope [zope.org] Web Application Server. To date unmatched. What Rails wants to be when it grows up.
Re: (Score:2)
Perl is probably my "base" language but it just seems so old-school for CGI programming. It could definitely do the job but it would end up fairly messy and very hard to read/maintain.
PHP is on the list as well, but everybody always points and laughs when someone uses it for web programming. It was designed specifically for this and AF
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Documentation Sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
Rails and Ruby are nice languages, but they really need to start focusing on their documentation.
The documentation on something as core as DBI returns, "Nothing known about DBI". The website for ruby DBI states that it is a ruby implimenation of Perl DBI. Except that the languages are different and therefore the syntax is different. You spend hours trying to figure out how to use the module.
Rails is much worse. If any documentation exists as all, it's usually behind the web site peepcode for $9 a tutorial. These tutorials are not documentation but serve as a How To for Dummies, leaving you without sufficient knowledge on the scalability, security, or in many cases, any real clue of how to use the code provided.
I have brought this up to the Rails community in my area and was told that if I really wanted to learn what was going on that I needed to read the source code. This was not a single person spouting off an answer but the general concensus of the community.
To find out what public methods are available and how to use them, and even what they do, by trolling through thousands of lines of source code is a sick joke. There is no rational business model that is going to accept this methedology of development and survive in the world for long. It is the availability of fundamental documenation that has made so many languages long standing corner stones of application development.
I'm no great fan of Java, but they have documentation on everything. I continue to use Perl every day because if I don't already know it, I can find the documentation in a few seconds.
And to state that all the documentation is available on some website, which they tend to do, is a little short sighted. I haven't yet managed to get my notebook working in all locations of the planet with internet access that's suitable to store all my documentation. Buses, planes, airports, malls, and many other locations simply don't offer unlimited free internet service. But Perl and Java have local documentation so you don't require internet connectivity to do your job.
Until Ruby & Rails gets their documentation together, they are going to be a minority second class citizen in the world of application development. No company can rationally invest in something that has nothing behind it.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)