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 : )

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!

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!

Enjoy!

Enjoy!

• Change Log

Enjoy!

Expect breaking changes as always (until we get to 1.0 of course), and expect more than normal, because this is a fairly big release.

I’ve created a page on the github wiki to collect advice for upgrading your existing apps. That page will grow over the next few days, but to get you started, here are the main things you definitely need to do.

First, Hobo in general:

Upgrade gem to 1.2 (you don’t have to do this but it’s so much faster)

$ gem update --system

Add the github gem server as a source (so you get will_paginate)

$ gem sources -a http://gems.github.com

Now you can upgrade Hobo

$ gem update hobo

Then, for your app:

You need to run some generators again. Be careful not to overwrite your code! The ‘d’ option to see the differences is useful. You might want (with the user model in particular) to just create a new blank Hobo app with the hobo command and compare the files manually. Run these generators:

• hobo
• hobo_rapid
• hobo_user_model
• hobo_front_controller

From there, go check out the page on the wiki

I’ll follow-up shortly (heh) with a post about what’s new in 0.8.

To upgrade simply

gem update hobo

or grab the files from github or the svn repo and update your plugin directories.

A highlight of some of the changes.

• Autocompleters and in-place-editors have been broken for a while. They’re working again now
• Some incompatibilities with older REXML versions have been addressed. DRYML should now work with REXML versions 3.1.4 to 3.1.7.3
• The “permission denied” page should be working again.
• The Clean theme works much better in IE6 now.
• We’ve squished a pagination bug that was messing a few people up

There’s a bunch more little changes — see the changelog for the full low-down.

Then on the tidying up side, there are two major changes. First, we’ve moved to gems for the whole of hobo. Installing the hobo gem should get you hobosupport, hobofields and will_paginate. As a result of this the hobo command no longer tries to fetch anything with subversion.

And we’ve made a change to the structure of the git repo. Because Hobo is really one project, with some sub-components available as spin-offs, it is really much better to have the whole thing in a single repo. So github.com/tablatom/hobo now also contains hobosupport and hobofields in sub-directories. The separate repos on github for HoboSupport and HoboFields will be deleted soon. The one downside is that you can no longer follow “edge Hobo” by using git sub-modules, because git doesn’t support partial exports. We’ll provide some rake tasks to make that easier at some point.

And then there’s the docs.

We’ve got the very beginnings of a complete reference to the Rapid tag libraries. At the moment it’s just generated from the source-code but all we need to do now is start adding in-line documentation comments. The format is probably not ideal either – it doesn’t lend itself to easily searching the whole library. We’ll improve that too in time.

The manual has been extended to include a fairly comprehensive guide to customising Hobo’s RESTful model controller.

James has added some great insights into working with DRYML in the third part of the POD tutorial and with some additions to the DRYML guide.

And finally there’s our first HOW-TO: adding an admin sub-site to a Hobo app. We’ve got a bunch more of these planned which should be very useful.

So! We’re making good on our promise to concentrate less on features and more on making Hobo accessible to others. Mind you, having said that, there’s a cracking new feature in the pipeline…