Posted by Richard White
Fri, 09 Mar 2007 20:54:00 GMT
AjaxScaffold has been deprecated in favor of ActiveScaffold
I’m relieved to announce that ActiveScaffold 1.0 RC1 has been released. ActiveScaffold is a Ruby on Rails plugin and the successor to the successful AjaxScaffold project that I’ve written a lot about here. This means that the end is nigh for AjaxScaffold: I’ll continue to keep the AjaxScaffold site up but no further development will take place. Once ActiveScaffold 1.0 is released I’ll put of the official EOL (end of life) statement on ajaxscaffold.com and suggest that everyone start using ActiveScaffold instead.
It also means the end of h1p acting as the project changeblog which I couldn’t be happier about :)
Posted by Richard White
Thu, 05 Oct 2006 16:53:00 GMT
AjaxScaffold has been deprecated in favor of ActiveScaffold
First of all, thank you to everyone who’s checked out the plugin and provided valuable feedback, we are listening. I will add that the plugin release has reenergized my passion for AjaxScaffold, which honestly was waning due to the upgrade problems associated with code generation.
And now, the news:
- I will no longer be doing point release blog posts. We’re keeping the CHANGELOG current and you can always monitor the package in Rubyforge so you’ll know when these bug fix releases come out. Scott or myself will continue to do posts on major updates, such as the upcoming 4.0.0 release, but I’m no longer comfortable with { height: 1% } turning into a rolling AjaxScaffold changelog.
- A number of your have asked about using associations in the plugin and rightfully so, we’ve been slack for not updating the old generator based article on adding associations. We’ll try and push out a similar post on using associations with the plugin version in the near future. After the next release making associations easier to manage, in both the table and in the form, will be our top priority.
The next release of the plugin will have a number of important changes that you should know about ahead of time:
- We’re jumping on board the new CRUD standard for Rails and realigning things so that an AjaxScaffold can mesh with something like SimplyRestful that’s now in Edge Rails. This means that the current list method will now be moved to index, all actions will use
respond_to instead of request.xhr?, and the show/create/index/update
/destroy methods will support returning XML/YAML/JSON. I’m using all this stuff now in SlimTimer for the upcoming API and it works great in concert with the SimplyRestful stuff.
- We will no longer support multiple ajax_scaffold definitions in a single controller. It doesn’t fit the new CRUD model and it’s not asking too much for you to use multiple controllers.
- And much more…
What’s also gotten us excited is that the project is recieving increased corporate sponsorship in the form of companies paying for development of new features and bug fixes and/or support agreements. I’m not at liberty to disclose who these wonderfully forward thinking companies are but AjaxScaffold is being used in the “enterprise”. If your company is interested in either a support agreement or subsidizing development shoot me an email.
Also, remember that we have a wiki page of people that are using AjaxScaffold, but that list need not be limited to public facing sites, if you’re company is using AS internally we’d love to hear about it. Add your company information and maybe a short blurb about how you’re using AS to the wiki page.
Posted by Richard White
Thu, 21 Sep 2006 21:50:00 GMT
AjaxScaffold has been deprecated in favor of ActiveScaffold
Just a quick not that I’ve put out a point release for both projects (generator v3.1.20 and plugin v3.2.1) to fix the fact that the :class_name attribute for ScaffoldColumns was broken.
That is all.
Posted by Richard White
Tue, 19 Sep 2006 01:46:24 GMT
AjaxScaffold has been deprecated in favor of ActiveScaffold
A quick patch for the generator which was choking at run time on some images that are no longer included in the distro. When I get some free time I’m going to improve our workflow for testing and getting out versions of both projects, but for now just bear with me (and let me know asap if there is a problem).
Posted by Richard White
Sat, 16 Sep 2006 08:09:00 GMT
AjaxScaffold has been deprecated in favor of ActiveScaffold
I made a bonehead move that broke sorting over the last few releases. An include was missing from lib/ajax_scaffold.rb:
module Controller
<strong>include AjaxScaffold::Common</strong>
def clear_flashes
You can either patch that yourself or get the new point release. What’s my excuse? Too much, and careless, diffing between the now two branches of AjaxScaffold (plugin & generator). Thanks go to Edgar from the forum for pointing out the problem.
Posted by Richard White
Wed, 13 Sep 2006 04:24:00 GMT
AjaxScaffold has been deprecated in favor of ActiveScaffold
Apparently the last release was shipped with some corrupted images (add.gif, indicator.gif, indicator-small.gif). This release is simply 3.1.6 without the image corruption. My apologies.
Posted by Richard White
Tue, 12 Sep 2006 21:09:00 GMT
AjaxScaffold has been deprecated in favor of ActiveScaffold
Ajax Scaffold is nice, but generated code just doesn’t scale well. There’s too much effort required to make cross cutting changes.
I really like Ajax Scaffold but it’s really hard to upgrade when a new version comes out. I usually spend a couple hours diffing all my scaffolds with a newly generated one.
I couldn’t agree more and we now have an answer to those problems: an Ajax Scaffold plugin. Creating a scaffold is now as easy as:
class WidgetController < ApplicationController
ajax_scaffold :widget
end
Need extra control over the displayed data?
class WidgetController < ApplicationController
ajax_scaffold :widget
@@scaffold_columns = [
AjaxScaffold::ScaffoldColumn.new(Task, {:name => "name",
:sort => "name.downcase" }),
AjaxScaffold::ScaffoldColumn.new(Task, {:name => "tags",
:eval => "widget.tag_names.collect{|t|h(t)}.join(', ')" })
]
end
And it can scale up to be just as customizable as the generated code. Need to customize the form partial? Just copy _form.rhtml into your controller’s view directory and change it. If you’re new to Ajax Scaffold you will probably want to play around with a generated scaffold first to get a feel for how all the pieces (controllers, views, etc) fit together as the plugin code is a bit more complex (but should make sense if you’ve used the Ajax Scaffold generator).
The plugin is almost a direct port of the functionality of the existing Ajax Scaffold generator with a few extra conveniences tacked on (total rows, sorting by method, etc). One major difference is that the scaffold_columns definitions have been moved from the model to the controller (The generator will be going this way in it’s next release).
We will be versioning the two projects in parallel to keep confusion to a minimum. The plugin release is 3.2.0 which will be the same version as the next generator release that incorporates some of the changes the plugin has made (scaffold_columns in the controller).
Many thanks go to Scott Rutherford for writing the bulk of the code as well as the howto guides (which you can get to via the Ajax Scaffold wiki). Ready to get started?
Posted by Richard White
Sun, 10 Sep 2006 03:52:00 GMT
AjaxScaffold has been deprecated in favor of ActiveScaffold
The fact that I used the word generator in there should tell you something’s up.
More news on Monday
Posted by Richard White
Thu, 17 Aug 2006 21:57:00 GMT
AjaxScaffold has been deprecated in favor of ActiveScaffold
I kinda let the cat out of the bag on this one with a comment this morning on the Streamlined blog. Justin Gehtland and myself have hatched an elaborate scheme to combine the best bits of both projects: the wonderfully declarative backend of Streamlined with the UI pleasantries of AjaxScaffold.
The tentative plan is to release the plugin version of AjaxScaffold that I’ve been using/testing extensively in SlimTimer. After that I will be looking to transition the project into more of a maintenance mode: putting out releases only as bugs are found. I feel that adding more features, such as search and improved handling of object relationships, would be redundant to the work on Streamlined and would make the project more complex than need be.
This is a huge win for RoR community, the users of each of these projects and myself.
AjaxScaffold will continue to be viable option for lightweight admin components but should you need more features Streamlined will be there in all its declarative loveliness and hopefully a hot new look.
Special thanks go out to Dan Snider for bringing both sides to the table and getting this ball rolling.
See Justin’s announcement
Update 10.20.2006:
The plugin version has been a huge success and has also really energized me again on the whole project. As such, we’re pushing ahead with new releases including those features I mentioned here that would not be done :)
We may still EOL the generator but the plugin is going strong.
Posted by Richard White
Tue, 18 Jul 2006 17:49:48 GMT
AjaxScaffold has been deprecated in favor of ActiveScaffold
Another minor release that patches the functional and unit tests. If you haven’t had any problems with your tests running then you don’t need to regenerate them with the new version, if you had this should fix those issues.
