O'Reilly Sinatra - Up and Running Book!
Alan Harris and Konstantin Haase have been working on their Sinatra – Up and Running book from O’Reilly! It’s nice to finally have a book out for the Sinatra and Padrino community! You can pre-order the book here.
With our growing community, its great that we have a book on the shelf to guide us through some of the more intricate details of Sinatra from both a seasoned author and the maintainer of the project. The Sinatra book itself totes a great description of what it entails:
Sinatra gives developers a small but powerful and scalable framework for building web applications with Ruby. This introduction gets readers started, helping them to build, install, and polish a first application. It also explores how Sinatra fits in the web application ecosystem, especially in comparison to its far larger cousin, Ruby on Rails.
Definitely looking forward to getting this book. Show your support and thanks to both Alan and Konstantin for releasing this awesome title!
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Padrino 0.10.0 - Routing Upgrades, Rbx and JRuby Support, and Minor Breaking
Roughly a month has went by since our last release and there have been several developments since then. Today, we are release our first minor point release in a while because we have introduced a breaking change to the way Padrino loads our rendering module.
This 0.10.0 release brings a couple new features such as enhanced route filter support, significantly faster routing engine, full compatibility with Rubinius and JRuby, bug fixes and several other improvements. The next releases coming in the pipeline are 0.10.1 (for Sinatra 1.3), 0.10.2 (for AS 3.1) and then a release candidate for our 1.0 release barring any major complications. Details for this release are below.
Rendering Module Changes
In this release, we have introduced a breaking change to the way Padrino loads the Padrino::Rendering module. Working with botanicus recently on an issue, we uncovered a problem with the auto-loading of our enhanced rendering module.
The issue is that any extension to Sinatra/Padrino that wishes to extend rendering was unable to load before our module. This produced situations where Padrino rendering is difficult to enhance with outside extensions. We have decided to remove the autoloading of Padrino::Rendering. For freshly generated applications, no action needs to be taken because Rendering will be included in the generated application.
For an existing application, all you need to do is add an explicit include to Padrino::Rendering:
# app/app.rb
class Demo < Padrino::Application
register Padrino::Rendering # <= Add this line
# ...
register Padrino::Helper
end
on every application within a project. For those that are curious, the Padrino::Rendering module is the functionality that enhances “render” to auto-locate templates and adds support for I18n amongst a variety of other conveniences that makes template rendering much more powerful and convenient. If you are using render "index" in your code then you are using this module. Commit here.
Rubinius and JRuby Compatibility
This release also marks full support for Rubinius and JRuby, two of the upcoming stable ruby implementations gaining attention. As of this tweet, we are now 100% compatible with Rubinius and have tested full support for JRuby. Uchio Kondo, the official Japanese documentation maintainer for Padrino has also created an excellent guide for Running Padrino on JRuby which gets you started. Commits here, here, and here.
Routing Speed Improvements
Josh has enabled serious performance gains in http_router which has once again allowed Padrino to parallel Sinatra in performance even in an more advanced demo application. In all our benchmarks, Sinatra and Padrino are generally neck-in-neck:
# Benchmarks
========================================
System: Linux 2.6.18-xenU-ec2-v1.0
Processor: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5430 @ 2.66GHz
Memory: 1740948 kB
Ruby: ruby 1.9.2p180 (2011-02-18 revision 30909) [i686-linux]
========================================
Using:
padrino (0.10.0)
rack (1.3.0)
sinatra (1.2.6)
rack (1.2.3)
rails (3.0.8)
camping (2.1)
========================================
Results:
rack => 620.95 rps
camping => 398.74 rps
sinatra => 309.78 rps
padrino => 302.64 rps
merb => 291.43 rps
rails => 122.37 rps
Commits here to upgrade http_router and take advantage of the optimizations. Thanks again to joshbuddy (Joshua Hull) of our core team for hacking on these upgrades!
Route Filters
An oft-requested feature is for enhanced route filters. While Sinatra does have basic support for filters, a heavy user will often find that it leaves things to be desired. Namely when dealing with namespaces and routes. Whereas before, a filter looks like this:
# app/controllers/example_controller.rb
DemoApp.controller :example do
before "/example/*" do
# Code here to be executed
end
get :index do
# ...
end
end
Now you can have a lot more options related to filters and they work much more intuitively thanks to Joshua (joshbuddy) and you can do:
# app/controllers/example_controller.rb
DemoApp.controller :example do
# Based on a symbol
before :index do
# Code here to be executed
end
# Based on a symbol, regexp and string all in one
before :index, /main/, '/example' do
# Code here to be executed
end
# Also filter by excluding an action
before :except => :index do
# Code here to be executed
end
get :index do
# ...
end
end
This gives developers a lot more flexibility when running filters and enables much more selective execution in a convenient way. Great to have this feature available as part of our routing enhancements. Commits here and here.
Route Ordered Priority
This release has also added support for respecting route order in controllers and also allows the developer to specify certain routes as less or more “important” then others in the route recognition order. Consider two controllers, the first with a “catch-all” route that matches any URL and the second below in another controller that is very specific. This wouldn't work by default because the second endpoint would be eclipsed by the catch-all route and as such would not be accessible. To solve this, you can do the following:
# app/controllers/pages.rb
MyApp.controller :pages do
# NOTE that this route is now marked as low priority
get :show, :map => :map => '/*page', :priority => :low do
"Catchall route"
end
end
# app/controllers/projects.rb
MyApp.controller :projects do
get :index do
"Important Index"
end
end
When setting a routes priority to :low, this route is then recognized in order lower then all “high” and “normal” priority routes. You are encouraged in cases where there is ambiguity, to mark key routes as :priority => :high or catch-all routes as :priority => :low in order to guarantee expected behavior.
Commit here.
Reloader Fixes
The reloader has been much improved in the last release, and we are continuing in that tradition improving the reloader again to be more robust in this release:
- Better support for constant reloading commit
- Fix Padrino::Reloader reloading also \$LOADED_FEATURES deps commit
- Remove incomplete constants when require fails (Thanks bernerdschaefer) commit
There is also a new way to add files to the reloader manually using the prerequisites method:
# app/app.rb
MyApp.prerequisites << Padrino.root('my_app', 'custom_model.rb')
This will autoload those files and watch them for changes. Commit here.
Other changes and fixes
- Adds support for the Ripple ORM (Thanks pepe) commit
- Hungarian translations added (Thanks Kormány Zsolt) commit
- Controller now supports conditions at multiple levels (Thanks bernerdschaefer) commit
- Gemspecs and config.ru are now executable (Thanks botanicus): [commit, commit]
- Add support for
padrino sfor starting the padrino server commit - Fix field generation for DataMapper commit
- Fixes issue with DM length for strings commit
- Fixes double loading for boot.rb in rake tasks commit
- Cleanup padrino-core dependencies in support_lite commit
- Bundler is now auto-loaded in our binaries commit
- Adds access to “current_controller” as part of the public API commit
- Changes DM instructions to recommend
rake dm:auto:upgradecommit