Rails 3.1 and SproutCore (Changelog Interviews #42)

Adam and Wynn caught up with Yehuda Katz to talk about upcoming changes in Rails 3.1, SproutCore, and his growing list of open source projects.

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Featuring:

• Yehuda Katz – Website, GitHub, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X

Show Notes:

• Wynn’s deck from ‘07 pays tribute to Yehuda
• Merb influenced and later merged with Rails
• SproutCore is an HTML5 application framework for building responsive, desktop-caliber apps in any modern web browser, without plugins.
• Carl Lerche is the other half of carlhuda
• Desktop MVC != Server MVC
• Handlebars.js is Yehuda’s optimization of Mustache.js
• Backbone.js is a lightweight MVC framework from DocumentCloud
• Bundler manages an application’s dependencies through its entire life across many machines systematically and repeatably.
• One of the biggest changes in Rails 3 is The Great Decoupling
• Railtie is the core of the Rails Framework and provides several hooks to extend Rails and/or modify the initialization process
• Asset handling is coming in Rails 3.1, meaning better support for Sass, Compass, and CoffeeScript
• Do you modify your Nginx setup?
• Yehuda prefers Sass and Compass to Less since the introduction of the SCSS syntax.
• Haml is the templating language of choice for sophisticated web devs.
• Yehuda likes JavaScript on the server but thinks evented frameworks like Node are more for edge cases than for the heart of the web.
• The Ruby Racer is a Ruby binding to V8 and is great for testing your JavaScripts without a browser
• Charles Lowell wrapped Handlebars.js as Handlebars.rb
• Yehuda loves CoffeeScript wants a runtime debugger before taking the plunge.
• libgit2 is a portable, pure C implementation of the Git core methods provided as a re-entrant linkable library with a solid API, allowing you to write native speed custom Git applications in any language which supports C bindings.
• Adam really loves Thor, a scripting framework that replaces rake and sake and is used by the new Rails 3 generators.
• There is no shortage of thor tasks from users on GitHub.

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!