Also, to clear up one thing that I did not address in the pre5 announcement: Hobo 1.4.0.pre5 and later do not automatically load dryml files in the app/views/taglibs/application/ directory. If you relied on this behaviour, you can add

<include src="application/*"/>

to your front_site.dryml or application.dryml

The major change in pre5 is that application.dryml is not necessarily loaded automatically any more. You will need to add an <include src="application"> to your frontsite.dryml and/or adminsite.dryml. If you don’t have any X_site.dryml files in app/views/taglibs, you will not need to make any changes.

New Hobo applications generated with 1.4.0.pre5 will incorporate this change.

To upgrade to pre5, change references from “pre4″ to “pre5″ in your Gemfile and run bundle install. If you reference hobo via :git in your gemfile, you can upgrade by running bundle update --source hobo

Other changes include bugfixes for table-plus, feckless-fieldset, input for=”EnumString”, live-search, defaultscope, accordion, tabs, hobojquery_ui styling, select-many.

There are two new tags: accordion-list & toggle, and support was added for the hobo_tokeninput plugin.

Documentation for 1.4 is available in the cookbook.

Install with gem install hobo --pre.

Major New Features

• all prototype.js code has been removed and replaced with jQuery

• new tags to facilitate fragment caching

• Rails’ asset pipeline is required

• themes may now be installed via plugins; multiple themes may be used per application

• plugins are first class citizens; RAPID is now supplied via a plugin

• several additional tags have gained AJAX support. This includes, but is not limited to a, filter-menu and page-nav.

• all tags now use the standard Hobo ajax support mechanism, which used to be known as Hobo form AJAX. The editor tags in particular have changed substantially

• part ids for AJAX updates may now be supplied implicitly or via a CSS selector

• support for AJAX file uploads

• support for push-state on AJAX requests

• new tags: nested-cache, live-editor, click-editor, formlet, hot-input, feckless-fieldset, accordion, accordion-collection, autocomplete, combobox, datepicker, dialog-box, tabs and more.

Documentation & Installation Instructions

Detailed documentation of the changes & Installation Instructions are available on http://cookbook-1.4.hobocentral.net/. Not all sections of that site have been updated for Hobo 1.4. The entire taglibs section is up to date.

Regressions

• after-submit, sortable-input-many and name-many do not work
• Hobo 1.4 breaks default_scope. If you’re setting the order, you can use Hobo’s set_default_order as a stopgap although once it’s fixed please switch back to default_scope as set_default_order is deprecated.
• remote-method-button, create-button, update-button, transition-button: normal usages of these tags work, but they do not work if you ask them to do AJAX
• live-search works, but it’s not ‘live’. You have to press return to start the search
• remove-button, remote-method-button, create-button & update-button used to display inline but now display as a block. In other words, they now display one per line rather than several in a single line.
• the rapid_summary tags have been moved out of core Hobo into their own plugin, https://github.com/Hobo/hobo_summary, which is not yet in a working state

The rest of the TODO list for completion of Hobo 1.4 is available here:

https://github.com/tablatom/hobo/blob/master/hobo/TODO-1.4.txt

The big news in 1.3, as most of you will know, is Rails 3 support. There are a bunch of other improvements as well. Read the details here:

http://cookbook.hobocentral.net/manual/changes

To get Hobo 1.3 just gem update hobo.

The work behind Hobo 1.3 is mostly thanks to Domizio Demichelis, and as always Bryan Larsen and Matt Jones have made some great contributions. Thanks guys, and thanks to everyone in the Hobo community for your part, even if it’s just being there on the forum for newcomers. And of course thanks to Owen Dall and Barquin International for their continued sponsorship, without which we wouldn’t have got here.

We would like to have released Hobo 1.3 much sooner, so apologies that it has taken so long. Work has already begun on Hobo 1.4 and Rails 3.1 compatibility.

We hope that using the LyX layouts and using a public Github repo will make it easier to manage edits and updates, and provide a better framework for you to contribute and “roll-your-own” version of the book.

If you would like to follow along, the Github repo can be found at:

https://github.com/BI/rapid-rails-3-with-hobo

Cheers,

Owen

You can install the release candidate with

gem install hobo -v 1.3.0.RC

In addition to Rails 3 support there are a ton of improvements to Hobo in this release. We have a new routing system where you can see all the generated routes in config/hobo_routes.rb. There is the new app-creation wizard to get you started even more easily with new projects. There are also many improvements internally, especially in the way Hobo interfaces with Rails, which will make it much easier to keep Hobo compatible with new versions of Rails.

We’ll be letting you know more about the improvements in Hobo 1.3 in some forthcoming blog posts.

The biggest change to Hobo 1.1 is that DRYML has been split into it’s own gem and may now be used independently of Hobo or Rails:

Dryml.render("<html><%= this %>></html>", {:this => something})

Automatic scopes has gained any_of_:

Person.any_of_friends(Jack, Jill)

The default password validation has been changed to 6 characters, one of which must not be lowercase. Luckily, we also made the password validation easier to change. See Bug #638 for more information.

The input-many, name-one and sortable-collection tags have been updated. See the documentation for more details.

New tags have been added: sortable-input-many, login-form.

Some css class names have been changed. Hobo 1.0 creates class names with the ‘[]‘ characters, which is technically illegal, although supported by all browsers. However, this does cause problems with some third party libraries, such as JQuery.

All code changes may viewed on the github log

To patch the reset password vulnerability, two changes have been made.

First of all, the lifecycle key hash mechanism has been changed. Existing lifecycle keys will become invalid after you upgrade. Lifecycle keys are typically short lived, so this is unlikely to be a problem for most applications.

Secondly, lifecycle keys are now cleared on every transition to avoid replay vulnerabilities. This new behaviour may be avoided by added the :keep_key => true option to a transition.

More information about the vulnerability can be viewed on the bug report.

Other changes:

The text input tag (<textarea>) has a security hole with versions of Rails prior to 2.3.4. This release makes using textarea safe on old versions of Rails, although it is highly recommended that you upgrade to Rails 2.3.11 because of other security vulnerabilities.

The “include” automatic scope has been aliased to “includes” to increase future compatibility with Rails 3. Future versions of Hobo will remove support for “include”.

This release increases compatibility with Ruby v1.9.2.

Hobo 1.0.2 introduced a major problem with chained scopes. This has been fixed.

All code changes may viewed on the github log

You can read more about the NIFA Reporting Portal and the Leadership Management Dashboard (LMD) here:

http://agile-business-intelligence.com/2011/01/22/new-nifa-reporting-portal-goes-live/

http://portal.nifa.usda.gov

We are now beginning the process of converting to Hobo 1.3 for Rails 3. Bryan is taking the lead on that.

Thanks much to Tom Locke, Father of Hobo, and all the other key contributors to growth of Hobo in the last two years, including Bryan Larsen, Domizio Demichellis,  and Matt Jones.

Those that contributed to the NIFA Portal and LMD 4.0 Hobo coding include Tom Locke, Bryan Larsen, Marcelo Giorgi, Gustav Paul, Angus Miller, Venka Ashtakala, and Jack Compton.  See my full blog (link above) for a listing of the entire team effort.

BTW,  if you are interested in Agriculture research data and trends–apply for an account.  You will have access to any public data in the system.

Cheers!

-Owen

We are soon approaching the release of Hobo 1.3 for Rails 3 (now at pre-release #25 and hope to have a draft of the PDF book “Rapid Rails 3 with Hobo” completed by the end of January. Thanks much to Domizio for all his hard work on 1.3 and his helpful documentation and edits to the 1.0 versions of “Rapid Rails with Hobo” and “Hobo at Work”, which Venka has incorporated up through Chapter 4 of the new version.

I hope that Hobo, Rails, and Ruby have made your app building more productive and fun.

Cheers!

-Owen