New DRYML getting closer
Posted by Tom | June 15, 2007 15 Responses comments

If you’re wondering why things have been a bit quiet around here of late, it’s because we’ve been taking a pretty hard look at where we’ve got so far with DRYML, and figuring out where exactly we want to be.

We really wanted to raise our game and make DRYML even simpler and more elegant than it is already. The good news is, things are starting to come into focus.

During this process we’ve considered a lot of out-there ideas, and have even considered a complete re-write with an entirely new approach. Fortunately, and as so often seems to be the case, the journey has taken us full circle, and we’ve ended up pretty close to where DRYML is right now. It’s just we now have a much better understanding of why it works so well :-). All we really need is a bit of polish here and there and a couple of tweaks.

Just today James and I have had a great day nailing all this down, and it looks like we’re ready to start implementing the new features. We’re really excited about this new stuff and are really looking forward to getting it ready for you all to start hacking with.

I’m afraid your existing DRYML pages won’t work with the new syntax, but the overall semantics is hardly changed so it should be a no-brainer to port everything over. It will be well worth it!

Reader Comments Add your comment »

Comment Number:
1
Written by:
haakon
Posted on:
June 15, 2007 at 5:14 pm

Wonderful news! I look forward to seeing what you come out with next. DRYML is beautiful stuff. I wonder if in this release you could make it possible to use DRYML for email templates as well? Just a thought.

Comment Number:
2
Written by:
Stuart Eccles
Posted on:
June 15, 2007 at 6:19 pm

Sounds good. Is the new DRYML going to be available as a seperate plugin from Hobo?

Comment Number:
3
Written by:
Tom
Posted on:
June 15, 2007 at 6:56 pm

Stuart - the latest thinking on these lines is that we’ll look into splitting Hobo into plugins after 1.0. So Hobo 1.1 might be “the plugin release”.

Comment Number:
4
Written by:
ylon
Posted on:
June 18, 2007 at 7:07 pm

Sounds very exciting Tom. I was just about to start on a new project with Hobo this week so this has definitely put me into a “pause” position until you launch the new bits on us. Is there any chance in the world that we’ll be able to see this as early as this week so that we can start fiddling?

Comment Number:
5
Written by:
Paul Hedderly
Posted on:
June 18, 2007 at 8:07 pm

Tom - really looking forward to this.

Just a request - any change you could do your development in a public SVN/SVK repository and use the cheap branches that it offers for new features / bug fixes etc - would be great to have quick access to what you are working on… and would it easy for the clever among us (not me :O( to give you patches…

Paul

Comment Number:
6
Written by:
Tom
Posted on:
June 18, 2007 at 9:07 pm

Paul - the svn repo has been public since the start:

svn://hobocentral.net/hobo

I do my development in branches/tom_sandbox, but be warned I have been known to check broken code into that branch.

Comment Number:
7
Written by:
evarist
Posted on:
June 22, 2007 at 2:19 am

Tom,
I have created a powerpoint for beginners to understand Hobo and put it on Slideshare. Please have a look at it and give me your comments.

Comment Number:
8
Written by:
Tom
Posted on:
June 22, 2007 at 6:44 am

Evarist - Got a link? I couldn’t find it

Comment Number:
9
Written by:
Evarist
Posted on:
June 22, 2007 at 2:13 pm

Oops sorry about that.
http://www.slideshare.net/Erasmus21ua/what-is-hobo/

Comment Number:
10
Written by:
Tom
Posted on:
June 23, 2007 at 8:40 am

Nice job Evarist - it’s really something to see stuff like this coming spontaneously out of the community

Comment Number:
11
Written by:
petef
Posted on:
June 30, 2007 at 2:54 pm

Hi Tom

What’s the last sensible revision of your sandbox to run against without needing to port dryml for now?

Comment Number:
12
Written by:
Evarist
Posted on:
June 30, 2007 at 7:35 pm

Hi Tom,
I have added another presentation.
http://www.slideshare.net/Erasmus21ua/agile-development-with-hobo/

Evarist

Comment Number:
13
Written by:
ylon
Posted on:
July 2, 2007 at 2:30 pm

Hey Tom, just hoping for an update with regards to when we’ll see a new stable release with which to start working. I know we’re all watching your branch, but it would be nice to have a “warm fuzzy” with which to work on larger projects.

Thanks much for any feedback!

Comment Number:
14
Written by:
Bernardo
Posted on:
July 3, 2007 at 9:26 pm

Congratulations for the fine job with Hobo, Tom. It really is a great step forward for Rails development.

+1 for DRYML as a separate plugin. More than that, I think it could be included in the Rails Core. Did you ever consider that?

Comment Number:
15
Written by:
Stuart Rackham
Posted on:
July 15, 2007 at 12:17 am

Tom - a big thank you for Hobo, DRYML is a real leap forward in Rails view abstraction (not to mention the baked in AJAX). Your design judgement is spot on — stick to what you think feels right and don’t worry about freezing the API until you’re really happy with it.

Looking forward to upcoming changes.


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