Nick Sieger

ActiveRecord JDBC 0.5

Posted by Nick Sieger Sun, 02 Sep 2007 04:47:26 GMT

This one’s a bit late -- consider it part of my get-caught-up-since-unclogging-the-clogged-blog series.

ActiveRecord JDBC 0.5 is out, so you may have heard (it went out the door a week ago Friday; c.f. Arun and Tom). The major feature you get in this version is a new database.yml configuration style:

development:
  adapter: mysql
  database: blog_development
  username: root
  password:

Ok, ok, so what’s the big deal? This is just Rails’ default database configuration. Well, that’s the point -- you no longer have to know anything about JDBC URLs, driver class names, and all that. We’ve baked it in for you. This should make it easier than ever to try out your Rails application on JRuby, as the only piece of manual configuration left for you is the ugly bit of JRuby-specific code you need to activate ActiveRecord-JDBC lurking right above the Rails::Initializer:

if RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /java/
  require 'rubygems'
  gem 'ActiveRecord-JDBC'
  require 'jdbc_adapter'
end

If we can obliterate the need for this last bit of code, and make it easy to obtain the necessary driver bits, I’ll feel good enough to call this thing a 1.0 product.