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.

The agility tutorial is now a gitorial, a tutorial made with git. This shouldn’t affect you much but it does give you a few more options when running through the tutorial. This should also give you more confidence that we haven’t let errors creep into the tutorial!

Besides numerous typos and errors being fixed, there are two new chapters in the agility tutorial: User Activation and Integration Testing

The User manual has a new chapter: Hobo Scopes. The HoboFields and HoboSupport doctests have been updated and included in the manual.

The cookbook now includes an additional section: Third Party Plugins. Submit your plugin and join the party!

Hobo 0.8.6 includes Rails 2.3 support.  Rails 2.2 support has been maintained.   Rails 2.1 support was dropped in 0.8.5.

Significant effort was put into unit and integration tests in this release.

Some small changes were made to item order and positioning to fix bugs with IE6. This may require updates in custom stylesheets.  The most likely problem is the positioning of <account-nav>.

Previously, the lifecycle transitions had a parameter called :params in the documentation and :update in the code.  The code has been updated to match the documentation.

Support for big_integer in HoboFields has been dropped.  It appears that this has never worked correctly.

<input-many> is now a polymorphic tag and the default tag for <has_many> inputs.

The content parameter has been renamed to description for generated cards.

<input-many> and <sortable-collection> have been improved.

Many tags have had parameters and attributes added to improve customization.

Many bugs have been fixed.  See the lighthouse or the git commit history for more details.

0.8.6 is a release candidate for Hobo 1.0.  At this point we do not believe that there are any outstanding bugs on Hobo that do not have workarounds.   The lighthouse shows the remaining tickets scheduled for 1.0

Automated Tests

Unit tests have been updated, and integration tests have been added. More information is available in this post.

Rails 2.3 Support

Hobo finally supports Rails 2.3.  More information, and instructions on how to upgrade are available in this post

The Push for Hobo 1.0

As Tom mentioned we hope to get Hobo 1.0rc1 out soon.  The code is frozen, we’re only fixing bugs.  Please ensure you’ve entered any bugs you find in our Lighthouse so we don’t miss any. And if you have any changes of your own, please send patches or pull requests quickly.

Hobo –no-rails

The --no-rails option was added to the hobo command to make it available when hobo is run as a plugin.  See this recipe for more details on how to upgrade to a plugin

Bugs Fixed

• update permission not checked for table controls
• filter-menu selected not working
• in-place editor for integers not working
• rapid crashes on bignum
• HoboFields rich types fix - was converting blanks to 0 for numeric types
• error editing resource: undefined method `dasherize’ for :integer:Symbol
• in place editor not working after ajax update
• minimize impact of bug in rails’ select_datetime

You can upgrade your application to use Rails 2.3 very simply:

    sudo gem install rails -v 2.3.2
    sed -i 's/2.2.2/2.3.2/g' config/environment.rb
    rake rails:update

Nested Model Forms

Rails 2.3 adds support for nested model forms.  Hobo has included support for nested model forms for quite some time now.  This has not been removed from Hobo, so you now have two mechanisms for nested model forms:

Hobo style:

    has_many :stories, :accessible => true, :dependent => :destory

Rails 2.3 style:

    has_many :stories, :dependent => :destory
    accepts_nested_attributes_for :tasks, :allow_destroy => true

After Hobo 1.0 is released we may decide to migrate Hobo over to the Rails 2.3 style nested models.  But Hobo 1.0 will support Rails 2.2 and therefore must include its own nested model support.

Unit Tests

Hobo has a set of unit tests and doctests.  I’ve updated these so that they all pass.  To run them:

    rake test_all

You may have to install/upgrade rubydoctest:

    gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
    sudo gem install bryanlarsen-rubydoctest

Integration Tests

I’ve created several integration tests for Hobo.  Integration tests live in Agility.

There are two different types of integration tests in Agility: Webrat and Selenium.

To run the webrat tests:

    rake test:integration

To run the selenium tests:

    vi config/selenium.yml  # edit appropriately
    script/server -e test -p 3001 &
    rake test:acceptance

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 : )