what_i_am.upto(2010)

Sorry for not posting a lot in the last weeks, I’ve been really busy and today I’m leaving for my well-deserved holidays in Egypt, joining my girl and friends who have been there for a couple of weeks already. When I’m back I’ll be in Hamburg for one week and hopefully able to finally write about my XMPP-Bot called MessageMate.rb. In the meantime, you are of course allowed to check it out on your own, the Readme provided on GitHub should provide you with some directions. Saturday, May 2nd then, I’m departing for RailsConf 09, which hopefully will be a blast like the last two RailsConfs in Portland, which I thankfully was able to attend. I’m not looking forward to Vegas as a city though, Portland was really impressive and I hope that I can get back there some day

Aaron Pfeifer from PluginAWeek has released a pretty decent state machine today. It’s got plenty of neat features like before- and after-transition hooks, state machine namespacing and the ability to add multiple state machines to a single class, integration with ActiveRecord, DataMapper and Sequel, the possibility to add validations to your model in certain states and, last but not least, an automated GraphViz visualization generator, which will give you a nice little drawing of your state machine.

I will definetely check this out next time I need a state machine.

The first release candidate of Rails 2.3 is out, which will probably be the last one in the 2.X-branch with the preview release of Rails/Merb 3.0 being scheduled for RailsConf in May 2009. Install with

gem install rails --source http://gems.rubyonrails.com

There is plenty of great, new features in Rails 2.3, so be sure to check out the official release notes as well as Ryan Daigles article featuring links to all of the summaries he wrote about the new features in the past months.