April 18, 2009 – April 24, 2009
Edge Rails has been undergoing major surgery for the past week, as the core team gets ready for a Rails 3.0 alpha release at RailsConf. We saw about 50 commits to the master branch in GitHub this week. Here’s a quick overview of the recent changes.
Rails 2.3.x Changes
Before digging into the changes on the master branch, there were a few things committed to the 2-3-stable branch. If you’re running on 2.3 edge, these are ready for you; they’re also ported to the master branch already.
- A couple of bugs involving associations with hash conditions have been fixed, notable to make sure that
:dependent => :deletewill work. - The PostgreSQL Active Record adapter now does the right thing if you use tables in non-default schemas. You need to set the table name in your model class, of course:
set_table_name 'other_schema.customers'commit - Also in the PostgreSQL adapter, a couple of bugs related to wrong quoting of names with capital letters are fixed.
ActionView::Path Refactoring
One major chunk of change in Rails 3 this week comes from the continued work to refactor Action Pack. This time, ActionView::Path was the target. Changes in commit include decoupling ActionView::Path from Action Controller and Action Mailer, which gives us two major benefits. First, consolidating similar code in one place makes it easier to understand and maintain. Second, by abstracting this stuff and giving it an API, we’ll make it possible for other components to participate in the controller layer, beyond mailers and traditional controllers.
There’s also some work here to set up for the future. The plan is to decouple templates from the file system, and to decouple localization from ActionView. Stay tuned!
Pluggable JSON Backends
You may recall that recently Rails went to pluggable XML support. This week, thanks to work from Rick Olson, we have pluggable JSON. This means that you can replace the default YAML-based JSON support with the JSON gem:
ActiveSupport::JSON.backend = "JSONGem"