This is another edition of Rails Core Weekly, affectionately known as RCW. A much nicer pre-web 3.0 version is available from the following url: http://www.pinupgeek.com/articles/category/rails-core-weekly-news We have an Atom/RSS feed available there as well. Rails Core Weekly summarizes the rails-core mailing list, a list dedicated to Ruby on Rails internals and its development. RCW is brought to you by Rodney Ramdas and proofread by the good people of The Caboose (http://blog.caboo.se/) for accuracy. Here are some the more interesting threads of the last 14 days or so. Unfortunately Trac seems to be pretty much down at this time so no ''New Features"" goodies in this post. Rails Core Weekly July 2 - July 16 ================================= [ thread: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/69703#new ] Somehow in the last RCW I missed Johm-Mason P. Shackleford proposal to: 1. allow Rails to load a plugin from gem 2. permit the plugin script to install them 3. give the plugin generator''s default Rake file the ability to package and publish a gem 4. introduce freeze/unfreeze for plugins Jeremy Kemper agrees gems are a good fit. Exciting stuff. [ http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/71523#new ] Martin is working on patch that in his opinion improves on ActionController filters. His solution could work like this: add_filter :filter => ProjectScope.new, :except => [:list,:index] class ProjectScope def filter(controller) Project.with_scope( ..etc.. ) yield end end end add_filter :filter => :project_scope, :except => [:list, :index] def project_scope yield # this way drops the clean filter scope in favor of the simplicity of using controller methods. end This would make before and after filters unnecessary. [ thread: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/71743#new ] Peter Michaux would like a label helper that does : <%= f.label :name %> Turns out Rick Olson wrote a plugin that does: http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/labeled_form_helper/ There''s a discussion about this plugin and the general question is ''why isn''t this in core ?''. [ thread: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/71980#new ] Tom Ward wants to hug SQL Server some more. He''s working on an aggregated patch and his work is much appreciated. [ thread: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/70990#new ] Francois Beausoleil''s route: map.game_instructions ''game/:game/instructions'', :controller => ''games'', :action => ''instructions'', :requirements => {:game => /\A[-\w \+%]+\Z/i} fails miserably with revision r4498. Jamis is spot on when he advises to take out the \A and \Z from the regexp. Nicholas adds ":game => /[a-z]+/ routes should interpret this as \A[a-z]+\Z. There for ^, \A, \Z, and $ inside regexp captures for requirements is not required, and should not be allowed". Francois then suggests he writes a patch to help those who will encounter this on their paths. Caio Chassot ran into an issue where flash was not swept if the filter chain was halted. Caio supplies a test scenario, go read it. Rick promises he''ll give it some attention over the weekend to fix it. [thread: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/73013#new ] Finally, Zach is spicing up AR with Optimizations promising us performance improvement of 400%-600%.... That was it ! More next week ( or the week after ;-) ) -- Rodney http://www.pinupgeek.com http://www.dutchrailers.org