[ANN] Nitro 0.6.0

[George Moschovitis]

Hello everyone,

a new version of Nitro was just released.

Homepage: http://www.navel.gr/nitro
Download: http://www.rubyforge.com/projects/nitro

This is considered a preview release, to keep developers investigating
nitro synced with the latest changes. A standalone version of Og is
also released.

here are the release notes:

This is a preview release, the api for the new features is not
finalized. This early release gives other developers to offer
suggestions
on the final form of those features.

Most notable additions:

* Og many_to_many relations with auto generation of the join table.
* Og has_one relation.
* PHP-style nested output buffering.
* Rails-style Filters.
* autoreload services.
* complile time evaluation of ruby code in templates.
* improved pager ui.
* initial version of FormBuilder.
* initial version of new_app wizard.
* Improved Blog example.

and... the nitro logo

some words about Nitro:

Nitro is an efficient, yet simple engine for developing
professional Web Applications using the Ruby language.
Nitro aims to provide a robust infrastructure for scalable
web applications that can be distributed over a server cluster.
However, Nitro can also power simple web applications for
deployment on intranets or even personal computers.
Nitro integrates the powerful Og Object-Relational mapping
library.

Suggestions, ideas, bug reports are welcome!
have fun,
George Moschovitis

 

[Raphael Bauduin]

Cool to see Nitro continue to evolve. I'm especially interested in testing Og (as soon as time permits)
as I have the impression it is more postgresql-friendly than ActiveRecord.

I took a quick look to the homepage and the docs, but both are several versions behind. Is there another online
place to look for the docs?

Thanks

Raph

 

[George Moschovitis]

Btw, check out the Nitro logo:

http://www.navel.gr/nitro

I would like to hear suggestions on the logo. Please use my email,
there is no need to 'polute' this list with gfx-related messages.

have fun,
George Moschovitis

 

[Michael Neumann]

Cool to see Nitro continue to evolve. I'm especially interested in
testing Og (as soon as time permits)
as I have the impression it is more postgresql-friendly than ActiveRecord.

Me too! BTW, postgres-pr should now work together with Og. At least it
did, as I tried it with Og 0.5.0.

Regards,

Michael

 

[George Moschovitis]

Hello,

as I have the impression it is more postgresql-friendly than

ActiveRecord.

this is correct, future versions will use psql-specific features like
object-oriented tables, and prepared statememts/stored procedures.

I took a quick look to the homepage and the docs, but both are several
versions behind. Is there another online place to look for the docs?

You are correct again. I am working on a brand new Nitro mini site
(with wiki, fora, etc) that will be always up to date. In the meantime
you can get the latest 'documentation' from the actual distribution.
regards,
George Moschovitis.

 

[George Moschovitis]

Hello Michael,

BTW, postgres-pr should now work together with Og. At least it
did, as I tried it with Og 0.5.0.

I promise it will be 'officially' supported in the next version

Btw I am exteremely interested in your pure Ruby XSLT implementation.
I would like to make Nitro more windows friendly in the next release,
and the usage of libxslt is problematic. As nitro uses XSLT ONLY in
pre-transforming templates at compile time a pure ruby implementation
will work just fine. Anw, I just downloaded your old release to see if
it useful. Do you plan to continue developing this library?
best regards,
George

 

[Michael Neumann]

Hello Michael,




I promise it will be 'officially' supported in the next version
Great!

Btw I am exteremely interested in your pure Ruby XSLT implementation.
I would like to make Nitro more windows friendly in the next release,
and the usage of libxslt is problematic. As nitro uses XSLT ONLY in
pre-transforming templates at compile time a pure ruby implementation
will work just fine. Anw, I just downloaded your old release to see if
it useful. Do you plan to continue developing this library?

Nope, I'm sorry. It was a two-day hack... so if you have some free days,
you could rewrite it using REXML ;-)

Regards,

Michael

 

[Scott Barron]

Cool to see Nitro continue to evolve. I'm especially interested in testing Og (as soon as time permits)
as I have the impression it is more postgresql-friendly than ActiveRecord.

Out of curiosity (and unfamiliarity with Og), in what ways do youu
consider AR to be unfriendly to postgresql? As someone who uses Pg
with Rails, and has been through the Pg adapter for AR once or twice,
I'd like to hear your thoughts about it acting in less than amicable
manner. Is there something Og does Pg-wise that AR cannot? If there
are real bugs, they can be sorted out, if they're feature requests
then a case can be made to DHH (who has always been very receptive to
even my griping . At any rate, I'll go check out Og and see what
that buzz is all about.

Thanks
-Scott

 

[George Moschovitis]

Out of curiosity (and unfamiliarity with Og), in what ways do youu

consider AR to be unfriendly to postgresql? As someone who uses Pg
with Rails, and has been through the Pg adapter for AR once or twice,
I'd like to hear your thoughts about it acting in less than amicable
manner. Is there something Og does Pg-wise that AR cannot? If there
are real bugs, they can be sorted out, if they're feature requests
then a case can be made to DHH (who has always been very receptive to
even my griping . At any rate, I'll go check out Og and see what
that buzz is all about.

Nope, AR works just fine with Pg. From what I 've heard DHH develops
primarily on Mysql, here at Navel we primarily use Pg. Because we love
Pg we plan to introduce some Pg-specific features in the near future though.

AR is a GREAT product, Og 'reuses' MANY of the ideas first introduced
in AR. There is a difference in the approach: AR maps the database
schema to (some form of) Ruby objects, Og generates the Database schema
that maps to standard Ruby objects. Give it a try

-g.

 

[Bauduin Raphael]

Out of curiosity (and unfamiliarity with Og), in what ways do youu
consider AR to be unfriendly to postgresql? As someone who uses Pg
with Rails, and has been through the Pg adapter for AR once or twice,
I'd like to hear your thoughts about it acting in less than amicable
manner. Is there something Og does Pg-wise that AR cannot? If there
are real bugs, they can be sorted out, if they're feature requests
then a case can be made to DHH (who has always been very receptive to
even my griping . At any rate, I'll go check out Og and see what
that buzz is all about.

Quote from a message of David to c.l.r
(http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby/msg/af82a23efd10a365):

Active Record is a MySQL-driven ORM mapper. It now has adapters for
PostgreSQL, SQLite, and latest SQL Server, but they all derive from the
principles of the original MySQL driver. So in the eyes of Active
Record, databases that deviate from the MySQL-way are the ones that are
"wrong" and special programming is needed in their adapters to emulate
MySQL behavior.

I totally respect that opinion, though I disagree, expecially on
considering mysql has the "right" behaviour ;-)

I extensively use some postgresql features, and if Og developers are
focusing on Postgresql, it reasonably feels the better choice for me.
For example, David doesn't like putting behaviour in the DB because he
considers the database as being used only by Rails. (from a discussion
we had on IRC).
This is not my situation (quite the opposite), and I need triggers eg.
The possibility exists my choices, even if right in my situation, would
be considered bad considered from AR's mysql minded point of view.

Some of the conventions also don't seem to match my setup, which is an
existing web app I would rewrite with Rails.

This doesn't mean I wouldn't use AR simpler setup. In that case I just
would have some more code to avoid the primary key naming convention...

Anyway, that's the reason I'm really interested in testing Og ;-)

Raph

 

[Thomas Quas]

That's great! I'm currently evaluating Og, the OR mapper, for my
project, and have to say, it's the most elegant solution to the problem
I have seen till today (coming a long way from Hibernate, Toplink,
ActiveRecord and a few others).

I just finished work on a 'mock backend' for Og, so that we can unit
test busines logic without database connection. If George accepts the
code, it should be in the upcoming release.


Best regards,

-tom

 

[George Moschovitis]

I just finished work on a 'mock backend' for Og, so that we can unit

test busines logic without database connection. If George accepts the
code, it should be in the upcoming release.

I 'll gladly review your patch :-D

regards,
George