A Rails Communique

After staying up until 5am last night, I slept in a bit this morning. I had lunch with Koz, his wife, and Ezra, and we got to talking some more about the issues we’ve been addressing over the past few days (we had a nice discussion about router recognition and generation, and various techniques we’ve both been using to improve performance of large route sets).

After lunch, I spent some more time thinking about how to further clean up ActionController and ActionView, and with the help of Josh and Pratik, who both recently did some refactoring work in ActionView, came up with a good plan of attack. I’ll post more details once I have some code to show, but the bottom line is that it should reduce the rendering pipeline down to a few hash lookups and a send. We already got close to this in Merb, but the recent work Josh did on ActionView provides a nice foundation for knocking this one out of the park.

Michael has continued his work on ActiveSupport, and is almost finished with a way of requiring ActiveSupport that will include only the barebones so that it can be used for third-party libraries. In particular, he would like to move Templater over from Extlib to ActiveSupport once the minimalist version has been released (the minimalist package now uses less resources than Extlib). Some details from Michael’s testing.

Daniel has been working on porting the Merb bootloader system over to Rails’ initializers, which should be 100% backward compatible but more flexible, especially for plugins.

Maybe one of these days we’ll take a day off. I hope to have some exciting code for you tomorrow!