This week in open source

Deprecations

We have officially stopped maintaining the following open source products: limerick_rake, trout, shoulda-context, and jester. Do you want to take over any of them? Let us know!

kumade

The kumade Heroku deployer now has a rake task hook for running code before the deployment (8bd2824). This was done by Joshua Clayton (joshuaclayton) in the new version: 0.8.2 (52a9348).

paul_revere

The paul_revere notification gem has this sweet button to hide a notification. Ben Orenstein (r00k) changed the duration of this hiding from one day to one year (5a773d4).

bourbon

Phil LaPier (plapier) has released version 1.3.1 of bourbon, the much-loved collection of sass mixins (e90113c). In this version we have a new syntax for animation shorthands, which means the old shorthands are deprecated (e6dcbf5, a6d3a32, 89cc340). Get it while it’s hot!

pacecar

We have a gem that generates scopes for ActiveRecord objects, named pacecar, which you would love if you also love methods that magically appear. Matt Jankowski (mjankowski) released version 1.5.3 (06b5e8e) with support for Rails 3.1.3 and 3.0.11 (dcc30d4) and which treats decimals as numeric column types, giving you all the methods that you need for those, too (ff7bc67).

paperclip

The oft-used paperclip file uploader gem hit version 2.5.0 (071c938) with a NEWS file describing the changes, written by Mike Burns (mike-burns). That’s me. I like writing about changes.

Jim Ryan (jimryan) changed paperclip to process any :original style before all others, which can be useful in case order matters (f56e863 and d3db7a1).

Nathan Hyde gave us a performance gain by only generating the file’s fingerprint if it can be persisted (9fb9255 and 4e07681).

Alexander Greim (iltempo) landed a feature on us: S3 headers can be set at runtime by passing a block as the value of the headers instead of a static hash (a83de65 and 7a8d1e6).

Steve Madsen (sjmadsen) found an edge case where if you set an attachment, save it, set a new atachment, save it, then refresh the missing styles using the rake task, it will crash. And he fixed it (dc53432).

And Jon Yurek (jyurek) finally fixed Paperclip::Attachment such that it no longer overrides the Ruby hash method with an unrelated one (3fd4c96).

factory_girl

As usual, factory_girl got way more commits than I want to read over in one sitting. For example: Simone Carletti (weppos) added a ruby version dependency to the Gemspec (e6e4d8b). He also fixed the link to our blog (11a79a0 and 30e13dd).

Things like that.

So on the feature front, Evan Larkin (elarkin) made it such that factories still work if you define a class that overrides the to_s class method (8b3ee85). Dmytrii Nagirniak (dnagir) added support for neo4j (5246fda and 591ec7a). Joshua Clayton (joshuaclayton) made it such that you can call methods that are on the object from within a factory definition (d918c1d).

More wishy-washily, Josh made a bunch of refactorings, the most important of which speeds up the whole product (f2e4138). You can read the rest of the refactorings as code with good commit messages: 2e2d490, 40242e9, 32ff41f, ac1df1d, a022dda, 1c7eab1, d9e0372, and b734b58.

The README was improved with the status of all the dependent gems (768dfaa), by Steve Richert (laserlemon). Daniel Schierbeck (dasch) fixed the formatting of sample code (1e82889).

In the end, Josh released version 2.4.0 (69957ea).

capybara-webkit

Matthew Mongeau (halogenandtoast) had fun taking in pull requests on capybara-webkit. Joe Fiorini (joefiorini) added the requested_url method that produces the URL after a pushState (7f907a0). Niklas Baumstark (niklasb) added submit and path methods (352823d, d07cf3d, 21f4b84, 83905bb, 4ceb874).

John Hume (duelinmarkers) added support for JRuby (0979db4). Pete Gieser (pgieser) fixed a double-escaping bug in URLs (fccb444).

Matthew Mongeau (halogenandtoast) fixed the link to the Capybara README (e2c103c) and linked to the mailing list (d8c640d), and Jo Liss (joliss) recommended bundle exec in more places (7fe06e9).

clearance

Our authentication system aptly named clearance got some love from Chad Pytel (cpytel) and Joe Ferris (jferris), resulting in the release of clearance 0.14.0 (5471159, 214d1dd, and 0dc43a6). The big deal is that the deny_access RSpec match and the flash messages were totally borked. They fixed it (2085f03, 23df300, and 160366e).

fake_braintree

Version 0.1.1 of fake_braintree was released, in which Gabe Berke-Williams (gabebw) fixed a bug in the failure message for the have_accessor_for matcher (9d97aa6) and also refactored everything (0a45900, 59a7b60, 3daf2aa, 0f955c6, 3e8745f, bb1f339, 6d7d90c, ac0d550, d2f470e, 3c66129, 8cf7d9c, 157b2a7, 8f21376, 29429ef, e4cef67, 9928436, 94cca24, 7bd4e20, 2dde9ed, e775167, a72e31b, 57f3623, d580024, ad82f0e, 3385e12, cacb537, ae86ebe, c6cead6, a352f33, f7a6cf5, 9f1fb3b, 124706d, ef8b13a, and b20e318).

The Road to Rails 3

Being at RailsConf 5 has given us the opportunity to finalize a lot of the work we’ve done to prepare our plugins and gems for Rails 3. Thankfully, for many of the most popular gems, we’ve been able to maintain both Rails 3 and Rails 2.3.x compatibility in one gem.  However, we’re taking this opportunity to say goodbye to some of our less widely used plugins, and some we plan on dropping Rails 2 support for altogether.

Obviously, Rails 3 isn’t actually out yet, so what we’re talking about here is Rails 3 beta 4.  We’ll continue to keep things up to date and tested as we all move toward the release of Rails 3.  Your help and patches are more than welcome.

So here is a comprehensive overview of the current status of the projects for both Rails 3 beta 4 and Rails 2.

Paperclip

We released Paperclip 2.3.3 a few days ago. This new version of Paperclip will work with Rails 3. Thanks to the investigation of nragaz and help from isaac and joeljunstrom on github, we worked out the kinks and it should be working with the Rails 2.3.x line, and Rails 3-beta 4.  For the latest version of Paperclip, we’re no longer officially supporting Rails 2.0.x. The earliest version that will work is Rails 2.1.0.  If you need support for an older version of Rails than that, you can use Paperclip 2.3.1.1.

hoptoad_notifier

A few days ago we released hoptoad_notifier 2.2.6 with includes support for Rails 3-beta 4 as well as all versions of Rails 2.x and Rails 1.2.6. 

shoulda

We just released shoulda 2.11.  Along with Rails 3 support, we’re maintaining support for Rails 2.3.x in this latest release.  However, the latest version of shoulda will not support versions of Rails less than 2.3.  If you need support for a version of Rails older than that, you can use a previously released version.

In addition to the Rails 3 support, shoulda 2.11 introduces some dramatic changes to shoulda, including a new way of interacting with all shoulda macros.  The previous way has been deprecated and will be removed in shoulda 3.0.  We’ll make a separate blog post detailing many of the very cool changes to shoulda and more details about the future of shoulda soon, but for now, take a look at the README for the latest information on setting up and using shoulda.

Factory Girl

We just pushed factory_girl 1.3 and factory_girl_rails 1.0.  This new version adds Rails 3 support.  Because of the way that Rails 3 loading has changed, we’ve decided to make a separate factory_girl_rails gem that will be used for when you want to use factory_girl with Rails.  The existing factory_girl gem is used by factory_girl_rails and would be used if you’re using factory_girl outside of Rails.  If you want to use factory_girl with Rails 2 you can continue to use the base factory_girl gem.

Clearance

We just released Clearance 0.9.0.rc1.  This is a release candidate for Clearance 0.9.0.  This new version adds support for Rails 3 but drops support for Rails 2.  Don’t fret, if you won’t be upgrading to Rails 3, you can use a previously released version of the gem (0.8.8).  We’re doing this one as a release candidate because of the dropping of backwards compatibility and the fact that we haven’t had a chance to test the new version in a variety of Rails 3 apps using clearance.

Please flex this release candidate with your Rails 3 apps and let us know how it goes.

Suspenders

Suspenders is currently at 2.3.5 (we haven’t been able to upgrade to 2.3.8 because of bugs we’ve seen with mongrel, webrat, and rack).  We anticipate that Suspenders will be upgraded to Rails 3 a little after Rails 3 final comes out.  But to be honest, we’re actually not sure yet what the upgrade path will look like for applications that are currently tracking Suspenders.  It may be impossible to do without so many conflicts that its not worthwhile.  We’re going to have to work on this more and keep you posted.  Additionally, we’re in the process of making some fairly dramatic changes to Suspenders.  Watch it on github and stay tuned here for more.

High Voltage

Fire in the Disco! We’ve also released High Voltage 0.9.0 which supports Rails 3 and is now a gem (it was previously just a plugin).  The new version also drops support for Rails 2.  If you need the previous, Rails 2 plugin there is a rails2 branch you can retrieve it from.

Pacecar

We also just released Pacecar 1.3 which supports Rails 3 and drops support for Rails 2.  As in the other cases where we’ve done this, you can use the previous version of the gem, version 1.2.0 with Rails 2, or track the rails2 branch.

Squirrel

Squirrel was born out of a desire to make a new query syntax that was dynamic while being clean and simple.  With Rails 3’s introduction of the New Active Record chainable query language, that goal has now been achieved in Rails.  As a result, we’ll no longer be maintaining Squirrel.  It was a fun ride.

Mile Marker

Over time, our workflow slightly changed for how we built applications and we haven’t used Mile Marker ourselves for some time now.  As a result, we’re taking this opportunity to cease maintenance of this plugin and bid it farewell.

Moving on down the road

We’ve gotten more and more familiar with Rails 3 during moving all these gems to it.  Many of the new features it offers are great, and existing features have been improved and cleaned up.  We’re looking forward to Rails 3 finally being released in the coming weeks.  Now that our plugins are up and running it should help us all to transition smoothly and quickly.

Thanks to the core team and various other railsconf attendees for spending time with us this week working on some of this - we’re looking forward to the final version of rails3!