Hobo - the web application builder for Rails

And finally… Here it is. The site has been restructured with a new front page that does a much better job of communicating what we’re all about. And there’s much more besides…

Hobo 0.7.4 is out. Please see the changes. Note that rubyforge seems to be having a very bad day. Downloading the gem files directy from http://rubyforge.org/projects/hobo seems like a good option. You’ll need both hobo and hobosupport.

There are two, count them, two tutorials on the docs page, as well as guides to the basics of DRYML and the Hobo generators.

The big breakup has begun. The HoboSupport gem, and HoboFields plugin (with the migration-generator) are now available without the rest Hobo. Let the whole world be freed from the drudgery of writing migrations! As you’ll see, HoboSupport and HoboFields are tested and well documented. We’ve achieved both in one go using Python-style DocTests. More on those in a later post.

The source code now lives on GitHub at http://github.com/tablatom. This is a really fantastic step forward giving us:

• A super easy way for people to contribute code
• A nice online browser for both the source code and commit trail
• RSS feeds for commits
• And even a wiki

And of course, if you do the GitHub thing, you’ve got to do the Lighthouse thing too. Lighthouse is now the new Hobo issue tracker.

BUT. More importantly than all that. This all marks the start of a new chapter in the life of Hobo. The documentation that’s available now is just the start. We’re now moving on to extracting DRYML as a separate plugin, which also means doctests for every last DRYML feature. Then it’ll be on to docs for the Rapid tag library.

The one thing that’s missing right now is screencasts. The old ones are still online but they’re so out of date that we’re not linking to them any more. A new series of screencasts based around the Agility tutorial will be created soon.

We will continue to add new features and functionality, and we will sill make breaking changes right up until 1.0, but the focus now is on stability, tests and documentation. Oh, and building a community of contributors. That means you!