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.
Posted by Tom | June 24, 2009
12 Responses
Go grab Hobo 0.8.8 : )
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!
Posted by Tom | June 23, 2009
3 Responses
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.
Posted by Tom | April 22, 2009
9 Responses
Things may have been quiet on the blog, but those who’ve been following the hobousers google group or keeping an eye on the github commits will know that the Hobo project is just as active as ever. In fact we have a couple of news items for y’all
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!
