Nick Sieger

RailsConf Europe: David Heinemeier Hansson

Posted by Nick Sieger Tue, 18 Sep 2007 08:14:00 GMT

Rebel With a Cause

Rails is no longer the James Dean character, looking outward, trying to convince you of something. It’s no longer about a rebellion or a revolution. Instead, Rails is settling in as a passionate, inward-looking craftsperson.

After the rebellion, settle in and enjoy the results of your work. David hasn’t been working directly on Rails too much, instead he’s been enjoying it.

And it’s not about David anymore. It’s about You (cue the Time Person of the Year cover). David wants Rails to be more friendly to newcomers.

Report #12: Verified Patches. Encouraging the community to approve patches, rather than limiting the decisions to the core. Opening up Rails. (Also, unfortunately looking a little scarce at the moment. Update: turns out it’s empty because patches are quickly applied, not because there aren’t any submitted!)

David screened the original Rails movie -- showing Apache setup, manually creating databases and tables. He quickly lost patience for it.

Compare to the current state of the art, with everything down to the routes and migrations gets created for you, lowering the barrier to entry (example: a new rake task db:create:all).

Rails 2.0 is largely about continual improvement and removing the cruft:

• Cookie-based session store as the default
• Routing: map.root
• Removing the dynamic scaffold :posts feature
• map.namespace and script/generate controller admin::posts
• *.html.erb files with the MIME type and renderer baked into the filename, since the two are now mutually exclusive.
• Automatically named partials with render :partial => @posts resolving to _post.html.erb
• Namespacing and named routes:

mop.namespace :admin do |admin|
  admin.resources :posts
end
# ...
link_to 'Show', [:admin, post]

• HTTP authentication

class Admin::PostsController < ApplicationController
  before_filter :ensure_administrator
  # ...
  private
  def ensure_administrator
    authenticate_or_request_with_http_basic("Blog Admin") do |user,pass|
      username == "dhh" && password == "123"
    end
  end
end

• Custom layouts for specific user agents (say, oh, the iPhone). Views can also be rendered, e.g., index.iphone.erb.

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  before_filter :adjust_format_for_iphone

  def adjust_format_for_iphone
    if request.env["HTTP_USER_AGENT"][/iPhone/]
      request.format = :iphone
    end
  end
end

# initializer
Mime::Type.register "application/x-iphone", :iphone

# In a controller method
respond_to do |format|
  format.iphone { render :text => "Hello iPhone", :content => Mime::HTML }
end

• atom_feed_helper, a new plugin -- builder for Atom specified in index.atom.builder
• <%= yield :head %>, content_for :head { auto_discovery_link(:atom, formatted_posts_url)}
• Debugger -- allows you to be lazy and leave your breakpoints in your production code, not that you’d actually want to do that. Dumps you into irb where you can inspect variables, etc. but you can also drop down another level to see the call hierarchy, etc.

So when will we see Rails 2.0? The preview release is coming, hopefully before conference end.