Posted by Tom | August 6, 2010
12 Responses
If you’re paying attention, you’ll know Domizio Demichelis as the contributor of some big improvements to Hobo’s internationalisation. Well Domizio has jumped in and is now taking over from where Bryan left off in the push to Rails 3 compatibility. Welcome aboard Domizio!
Domizio is going to let us know how he’s getting on via some short posts here on the blog. He just sent me his first thoughts, so over to Domizio:
Posted by Tom | July 1, 2010
One Response
A while back I was approached by Paul Blair who was interested in doing an email interview about Hobo for InfoQ. That interview went out a few weeks back and is available here.
The actual interview was quite a bit longer than the version that got published, and the full version is probably of interest to anyone interested in Hobo, so I’m posting it here in full.
Posted by Tom | June 1, 2010
3 Responses
Just pushed to rubygems.org – Hobo 1.0.1. This release contains some bug fixes and performance enhancements. Just
gem update hobo
There are two speedups: one that reduces the number of database accesses by Matt Jones and one that speeds up compilation of DRYML by Petteri Räty.
If you’re interested in the details of what got fixed, take a look at the commit log on github.
Thanks very much to everyone who contributed!
Meanwhile work continues on Hobo 1.1. Watch this space : )
Posted by Tom | February 23, 2010
29 Responses
We did it! More than three years after the original open-source release of the Hobo beta, version 1.0 is finally here.
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.
