This rc version took some time to get ready, we’ve been running a rails4 branch for some time already and one of the reasons was because of the changes required to make it compatible with the new strong parameters API from Rails 4. We are aware that some people have been using this branch since Rails 4.0 beta1 with success, and we’re now inviting you to try 3.0 rc with the recent release of Rails 4.0 rc1.

Devise stable

Together with the 3.0 beta version, we’ve released Devise 2.2.4 with a few enhancements and bug fixes, make sure to check the changelog to see the new goodies. All changes are also included in the rc version.

Simple Form

Simple Form has been running a 3.0 rc version for a couple months already, fully compatible with Rails 4 as well, and today we are releasing its release candidate version. In Simple Form master we just dropped support to the 3.x Rails series, focusing our work on Rails 4 compatibility from now on, due to a series of improvements in Rails 4 regarding form helpers – but don’t worry, we will be keeping a v2.1 branch with Rails 3.2 compatibility for a while.

We have some cool plans to improve the wrappers API even further, but that’s subject for another blog post :).

Responders

Responders has been around for quite some time already and we use it in most of our projects, so today we’re celebrating its 1.0 release candidate version, specially to support Rails 4.

Show For

Show For just got a new stable release, v0.2.6, with all the enhancements and bug fixes that were in master, plus a v0.3.0 rc version that adds Rails 4 support.

Mail Form

Mail Form also got a new 1.5 rc release with Rails 4.0 compatibility. Nothing else has changed from the current 1.4 version.

Has Scope

Has Scope is getting a new 0.6 rc version with Rails 4.0 compatibility, including a couple of fixes that were already present in master.

Compatibility

All these new releases are officially dropping support to Rails 3.0 and 3.1, and Ruby 1.8.7. We’ll keep compatibility with Rails 3.2 and 4.0 from now on, all of them on the same branches except for Simple Form which has different branches for each Rails version.

Wrapping up

We’ve got new hot releases for you to try out with Rails 4, please give them a try and let us know if you find any issue or have any feedback.

We’d also like to specially thank everyone involved in helping us getting these projects up and running in Rails 4, without you folks that’d have never been possible.

Enjoy <3

The post Devise and Rails 4 first appeared on Plataformatec Blog.

Open Source

The year has begun on fire. In February, José Valim made his way into the Rails Core team and has been doing a great work since then, including many contributions to the Rails 3 release.

We are also really proud with Devise. It got very mature, achieving the 1.0 version this February. Since then, Devise is becoming one of the best solutions for authentication in Rails and also one of the most watched repositories on GitHub.

In August, Devise 1.1 was released with Rails 3 support and a bunch of cool features. Recently, a lot of work is being done towards the 1.2 version, which includes full support to the awesome OmniAuth gem.

We also released SimpleForm this year. SimpleForm is our take on building forms in a simplified way lead by Carlos Antônio who recently did a great work on HTML 5 support.

Other gems were released, such as ShowFor, which is a DSL to simplify how you show your objects in views and also Responders, a collection of Rails 3 responders.

Book

Eariler this month, José Valim’s book entitled Crafting Rails Applications has been released by the highly acclaimed publisher Pragmatic Bookstore! The book covers internal aspects of Rails 3 and how you can bend it to your will. The reviews and buzz has been great so far, even though still in beta. Grab your copy now!

Events

This year was also very productive in terms of events. We’ve been to a lot of events, heck, George was even able to go to RailsConf, in Baltimore! Also, José Valim has spoken in various events, including Euruko 2010 (includes video), RubyConf Brazil 2010 (talk in portuguese) and OxenteRails 2010.

Carlos, Hugo and George did their share as well, speaking at various events, from smaller and user-group events to bigger ones such as OxenteRails, RS on Rails and QCon SP.

Company

The company itself is getting more mature and increasing. At January 2010, PlataformaTec was composed of 6 people, and up until December 2010, 5 other people joined the company (including myself)! We also have started playing with iOS development, something we believe to have a great future, expect future blog posts on the subject.

Great 2011!

Have a great New Year! We wish you all the best for year to come. We have high expectations for 2011, so stay tuned!

The post 2010 – A year in review first appeared on Plataformatec Blog.

  Name

  <%= @person.name %>

We had already created some helper to do the work for us, but having this helper being copied from one project to another wasn’t that DRY. That’s when we decided to create ShowFor.

ShowFor is a DSL to help you showing a list of attributes, with I18n, perfect for show pages in CRUD interfaces. It allows you to replace code/html duplication in your views using a nice syntax. Let’s see what we can do.

Attributes

Let’s imagine we have a Person model, which has first_name, last_name, age, photo, and confirmed attributes. The following lines show a list of values for a specific person:

<% show_for @person do |p| %>
  <%= p.attribute :first_name %>
  <%= p.attribute :last_name %>
  <%= p.attribute :confirmed? %>
  <%= p.attribute :created_at, :format => :short %>
  <%= p.attribute :age, :if_blank => "No age" %>

  <% p.attribute :photo do %>
    <%= image_tag(@person.photo_url) %>
  <% end %>
<% end %>

Here is an example output you will get:

  
First name
Carlos
  
Last name
Antonio
  
Confirmed?
Yes
  
Created at
08 Mar 11:30
  
Age
24
  
Photo

    
  

As you can see, you are going to get a default html markup, with classes and ids to help you design with CSS. And if you noticed, we are using extra options in some attributes, lets take a look at some of them:

• :format lets you pass any format that will be used together with i18n, for date/time attributes only, as you would use with the l helper.
• :if_blank specifies what to show if the attribute is blank. It may have a default value from i18n.
• do...end: using blocks you can handle the content for that specific attribute by yourself, as we have done in this example for the photo attribute.

Boolean attributes, as our :confirmed, also have a default for true and false values, and can be configured through i18n. If you want to say “Yup” and “Nope” instead of “Yes” and “No” respectively, just change your i18n file. You can also pass a :escape option to not escape the value (true by default).

Associations

ShowFor also works with associations. For instance, we can easily add that a Person belongs to a City with a name attribute and that it has and belongs to many Tags. To handle the former, we can do:

<%= p.association :city %>

ShowFor will guess the right attribute to show by looking into all possibilities configured in ShowFor.association_methods and in this case choosing :name. But of course, you can change it as you need, on-the-fly:

<%= p.association :city, :using => :full_name %>
<%= p.attribute :full_name, :in => :city %>

Both calls above will have the same output, just choose the one which suits you better.

Handling collections is easy as belongs_to associations. You can just pass the association to ShowFor and it will know whether it’s a collection or not, generating a list of elements using ul and li tags.

<%= p.association :tags %>

However, if you want to render the collection inline, you can use :to_sentence or :join as options:

<%= p.association :tags, :to_sentence => true %>
<%= p.association :tags, :join => ',' %>

It’s also possible to pass a block to the collection. ShowFor will create the wrapper tag (ul by default in this case) and will yield each element in the collection for you to handle it:

<% a.association :tags do |tag| %>
  
<%= link_to tag.name, tag %>
<% end %>

Labels

You may have noticed ShowFor has a default label using the strong html tag. It also exposes you this as a helper, so you can use it whenever you wish:

  <%= p.label :first_name %>
  <%= p.label :age, :id => 'person_age' %>

  First name
  Age

Installation

ShowFor is already compatible with Rails 3, at the time of this writing in version 0.2.0. You can just follow the instructions in the README to get it installed.

If you are using Rails 2.3.x, take a look at the 0.1 branch, and follow the installations in the README for this branch to get it up and running.

Please don’t forget to run the generator and take a look at the initializer, it will allows you configure several parts of ShowFor.

script/generate show_for_install

Closing

ShowFor helps you to show your objects easily with a default html markup, and can be totally configured to suit your needs. It has been helping us in every project, and we hope it may help you too. If you have any doubt, please take a look at the README, there are a lot of examples and documentation there.

And what about you? Do you have any helper you use every single day that might be transformed in a plugin/gem? Do not hesitate on doing this, we would be glad to see your work.

Enjoy!

The post Show your objects baby! first appeared on Plataformatec Blog.