Go get it!

gem update hobo

or

gem install hobo

I for one never thought it would take that long! But then the project has changed such a lot. In the early days we thought the automatic UI provided by Hobo would be a good starting point, but not much more. As we went on we noticed more and more patterns in web UIs, patterns we could capture in Hobo. As a result you can now get a surprisingly usable app for almost no effort beyond creating your models.

Of course from there you can customise things to your heart’s content – that was the goal right from the start and it hasn’t changed.

Along the way we added some killer features too. Writing migrations by hand is pretty much a thing of the past in Hobo apps, since we added the migration generator (also available with the rest of Hobo!). Hobo’s lifecycles make it so much easier to implement multi-step processes, you get a UI to your lifecycles with little or no code, and there’s even support for secure links in email messages (for implementing things like forgotten-password and account-activation).

We’ve also put a huge effort into getting Hobo documented. We’ve built a community driven documentation site – cookbook.hobocentral.net, which is also the home of the extensive manual. There’s a new introductory screencast. Oh and there’s two books available to download, and a third on the way!

Perhaps more importantly than any of that, there’s a thriving and very friendly community. One of the most consistent comments we get from developers is how much they appreciated all the help and support they got while building their first Hobo app. Be sure to check out all the cool apps they’ve built.

For myself personally, and on behalf of the whole Hobo community, a huge thank-you goes out to all the people that helped us get here. In the beginning there was Line Learning & Communications and Jiva Technology, who contributed enormously by choosing Hobo for major projects, and of course my coding partner on those projects and the early version of Hobo, James Garlick. James’ keen sense of aesthetics has had huge impact on the design of Hobo, inside and out. We had a good laugh too!

Today of course there’s Owen Dall, Ramon Barquin, and the team at Barquin International. Owen spotted us at an early stage. He saw in Hobo a vision for the future and took a big bet on us. Barquin’s sponsorship has made Hobo 1.0 possible. Thanks Owen! There are too many people in the open-source community to thank individually, but a mention has to go to core contributors Matt Jones and Bryan Larsen — as you know, it’s been you guys much more than me that have polished things off, fixed the bugs, and got us to 1.0. And in the background all along, unseen by most, is my business partner, coach, cheerleader, agony-uncle and general strategist, the one and only Mr. Nigel Powell. Well done everyone!

At this point it is customary to say “and this is only the beginning!”. In this case however, it’s not just an up-beat signing off remark. I’ve not actually been committing loads of code to Hobo in the last few months while Matt and Bryan have got us to 1.0. The reason is, I’ve been in the back room, quietly tinkering, tweaking, experimenting, honing. The next chapter in this story could just be a game-changer. Stay tuned.

Actually I only just published the gems so don’t forget that Rubyforge takes a while to get its act together.

I’m really posting this on behalf of Bryan who’s done pretty much all the work in this release – thanks Bryan! And thanks to Owen and the guys at Barquin for their continued support.

This release is mostly bug fixes. The low-down, as usual, is in the changelog

Oh one more thing. We liked the fresh new look in the previous post so much that it’s now the Hobo default. (that doesn’t mean you need ImageMagick, we just included the generated PNG files in the Clean theme)

Enjoy!

Hobo 0.8.8 is coming very soon, consisting mostly of bug fixes and bringing us that bit closer to the hallowed version 1.0. While we’re waiting, I though I’d quickly let you know about a very simple Rails plugin I knocked up that makes it extremely easy to add gradient background images to your stylesheets. (If you follow the hobousers group you’ve already seen a mention of this.)

For example:

div.featured { background: url(/gradient_images/50:aaa:fff.png) repeat-x white; }

All that’s happening is that the plugin is rendering a PNG image on the fly; 1 pixel wide, 50 high, with a gradient from a light grey (#aaa) to white. It renders the image you would otherwise have to make yourself in Photoshop or whatever.

The general pattern for the image URL is:

/gradient_images/<height>:<start-color>:<end-color>.<format>

Colours are 3 or 6 digit hex values, as in CSS. The format can be anything supported by ImageMagick (e.g. png or jpg).

You can also do multiple gradients in the same image, like this

div.featured {
  height: 100px;
  background: url(/gradient_images/50:aaa:fff::50:fff:aaa.png) repeat-x 
}

That will give an image 100 pixels high fading from grey to white and back to grey.

Note that you only take the performance hit on the first request, after that the images will be served up directly by your web server thanks to Rails’ page caching. You’ll see a bunch of image files in public/gradient_images.

Requires Rails 2.3 and RMagick.

The plugin is available on github.

UPDATE: We just threw up a quick example app on github. It’s great to see how much nicer you can make the default Hobo app look with just three CSS declarations.

First up, I’d like to give a big welcome to Bryan Larsen, who is now working on Hobo full time. Bryan made some excellent contributions entirely off his own back, and he happened to come to the end of a previous project at just the right time so we snapped him up. A big thanks too to our good sponsors at Barquin International for helping us to bring Bryan on to the team.

As requested on hobousers, we’re going to start putting out regular updates on the blog about the latest changes to the code; a sort of “This week in Edge Hobo”. Bryan will be helping out with these posts.

And the other little item of news is that we’ve started the push to Hobo 1.0. The feature set is frozen at this point, and we are working our way through bug fixes, improving the test coverage and docs. If you’ve got a pet bug that you want to see fixed in Hobo 1.0, make sure it’s ticketed.

Stay tuned!

Many thanks to Dr Nic for the early work in getting Hobo running as a gem, and for those super cool TextMate tricks. And to Mathijs and Matt for many fixes and tweaks here and there. And of course Mr. James Garlick for a ton of commits in all areas of Hobo, contributions to the docs, and for making Hobo look good both on the outside (the Clean theme) and the inside (James is my API aesthetics consultant!)

Also a shout to Jason and Joel over at i5labs. These guys helped me out with a Hobo project that I got too busy to finish. If anyone out there needs development or help with a Hobo project, drop i5labs a line – they know what they’re doing.

Also thanks to Pete Ferne and the boys at Jiva, for choosing Hobo for Beanbag, and for the many contributions to Hobo which they funded. I am going to do a proper post about Beanbag at some point – promise!

Finally a big thanks to everyone in the wider Hobo community for their involvement, large or small.

Merry Christmas — or whatever you will be celebrating — to all!

See the changes for the details. As always, remember that Rubyforge takes a good while to catch up, so gem update hobo might not work for a while. You can download the gem files from Rubyforge manually though.

That’s pretty much me done for the year — I’m taking some time off now. And what a year it’s been. Progress has accelerated dramatically since our sponsors Barquin International came on board. We wouldn’t be remotely close to where we are now, especially in terms of documentation, without their support. So I’d like to say a very big thank you to Owen and the team over at Barquin.

It feels like we’re in great shape for a very exciting 2009 with Hobo. Just in time for the meltdown of the entire global economy. Heh – you win some you lose some : )

In addition to the usual slew of small improvements, the main features of this release are:

• Completely new and much improved permission system
• Not completely new but much improved lifecycles
• The beginnings of a new “View Hints” system — a place to declare things that don’t belong in the model, but help Rapid create the right UI.

Yes those two links are to detailed documentation – wonders will never cease!

Please note that Hobo 0.8.4 requires Rails 2.2.2.See the changes for the details. Please remember that Rubyforge takes a good while to get with the program, so gem update hobo might not work for a while. You can download the gem files from Rubyforge manually though.In other news the Hobo Cookbook continues to outgrow its name and is now the home of the Agility tutorial.

Enjoy!

• http://cookbook.hobocentral.net/manual/dryml-guide

Enjoy!

Now on to the other chapers of the manual…

You may have noticed we have a nice new look thanks to James. You may also notice an innocuous looking link in the top right — “Taglibs”. Yep – we now have a nice online reference to the tag libraries. Before you get too excited, many of the tags don’t have proper documentation yet. If you look here you’ll see that many of the tags are in a light grey – those ones don’t have a doc-comment in the source code yet. We’re working our way through them.

At the moment tag names don’t come up in the search, but on that same page you can use your browsers search-in-page, because every tag is listed.

The great thing about having a single home for both the recipes and the reference docs is that we can add all sorts of cool cross linking. Every tag in the reference section could link to “Recipes that show this tag in use”, and recipes could have the tags clickable so you can go right to the reference material for that tag.And of course everything is user-commentable.

Later we’re also going to add “Tutorials” and “Hobo Manual” sections. It will be a one-stop-shop for all your Hobo Documentation needs *smile with tooth-bling*.

Top priority right now with Hobo is to churn out as much documentation in as short a time as humanly possible. We felt we needed a home for all these docs – a simple app that supports user-comments, requests for documentation, searching etc. Sounds like a distraction from actually writing the docs? : ) Well… what if it only took a day? How much of an app could you turn out in a single day?

Quite a lot, it turns out.

The experience of creating the Hobo Cookbook was literally a rush for me. It really felt like we’re reaching the point where app-development is fast enough that you can sit down side-by-side with the client and have them guide you towards the app they really want and need. Hobo is coming together. In particular the DRYML generators introduced in 0.8 made everything so much easier.The really encouraging part was that it never felt like Hobo was penning me in. Whatever small tweak I wanted to make in order to improve the app, I was able to quickly achieve without discarding the rest of the automatically generated stuff.

But enough of this idle banter. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: – The Hobo Cookbook

It’s even open source, so it provides documentation in more ways than one!Now we just need to populate it, so that you folks can all learn how to build apps in a single day : )