Streamlined

Posted by jgehtland Fri, 18 May 2007 02:29:39 GMT

Wow! I want to publicly thank everybody who came out to the tutorial today. You guys had a lot of great questions, and stuck with us for two hours and forty five minutes. Just awesome. Thanks again!

Also, thanks to Luis and Matthew who helped out and kept me on track. Nice job, fellas.

We spoke with some folks in the audience who showed us interested modifications to Streamlined, and we encouraged them to submit them to us as patches. If they do it, we have some great new features to release soon.

One of the most important criticisms we received from a couple of people is that the blog here at streamlinedframework.org doesn’t mention the team behind Streamlined at all, which can give the impression that perhaps the framework is being written by some guy in a basement somewhere. So, to allay that, we’ve just added a link to our corporate website, but I’ll outline who we are here, as well.

Streamlined is managed by Relevance. We’re a consulting, training and development shop located in Chapel Hill, NC. Currently, the committers on Streamlined are:

• Stuart Halloway and Justin Gehtland, co-founders of Relevance
• Matthew Bass, developer of Teascript
• Luis de la Rosa, consultant, programmer, all-around good guy
• Glenn Vanderburg, luminary of programming languages, long-time speaker and suuuuuuper geeeeeenius
• Venkat Subramaniam, agile process guru, CS professor, and not Ramnivas

We’d love to add more. Come on by!

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Posted by jgehtland Wed, 16 May 2007 21:52:05 GMT

We’ve just posted three new screencasts for the newest version of Streamlined, we hope you’ll enjoy them.

• Intro (the getting started stuff
• Simple Column Management
• Enumerations

We’ll have many more online in the next few days, but here are the first. Enjoy! Feedback welcome!

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Posted by jgehtland Mon, 14 May 2007 16:43:24 GMT

I’ve added a link to the tutorial slides to the Wiki, as well as updated the Relationships page to show the new syntax for managing relationships.

I’ll be posting a whole new suite of screencasts during RailsConf, so stay tuned for those.

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Posted by jgehtland Sun, 06 May 2007 23:50:26 GMT

We’ve been fielding a lot of questions on this lately, so here is the official release statement:

The last official release was 0.0.7, which was the switchover from generator to plugin. Since then, there were a couple of point releases, but most of the new development has been happening in Edge (which can be found at http://svn.streamlinedframework.org/edge/streamlined).

The Edge code will go to 1.0 status, and be the official, always backwards-compatible to it, version, hopefully by the time RailsConf rolls around.

Amazing how the 9 months since we officially launched the project has felt both eternal (I can barely remember what 0.0.1 looked like) and ephemeral (I can barely believe its almost RailsConf again). Streamlined has been through a lot of changes, but we think we’ve got something pretty useful.

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Posted by jgehtland Sun, 06 May 2007 23:44:02 GMT

I’ll be giving a tutorial on Streamlined on Thursday at RailsConf ‘07. I’ve gone ahead and posted the slides that we’ll be using as a backdrop behind me as I yammer on and on about how we use Streamlined for our customers and get things going quickly on our projects. If you are coming to the tutorial and want to get a heads up on what we’ll cover, or if you aren’t going to be able to make it but wish you could, or maybe you just like collecting presentations and storing them on your too hip USB drive, whatever. The presentation can be had at:

http://streamlinedframework.org/streamlined-tutorial.pdf.

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Posted by jgehtland Sun, 06 May 2007 23:34:26 GMT

We’ve had a busy few weeks, so here’s an update on some of the new features we’ve added in Edge recently:

Enumerations

We’ve added the ability to denote a column as an enumeration. For example, in the sample project, an instance of Team has a column called :sport. It contains a string, but instead of being a free input, by making it an enumeration, the user is given a drop-down which provides them their options. The syntax looks like this:

user_columns :sport, {:enumeration => Sport.SPORTS}

The value passed to :enumeration can be any array.

Associations editable everywhere

In the original version of Streamlined, associations were only editable through Ajax from the list view. During create and edit, the associations were hidden. Now, associations can be edited from list, edit or create views, and by default, all three. To change that behavior, you can use any of the following options:

• :read_only. The association only displays, cannot be edited in any view.
• :create_only. The association can only be edited during creation of the record.
• :edit_in_list => false. Turns off editing of the association in the list view.

Usage:

user_columns :players, {:edit_in_list => false},
                    :coach, {:create_only => true},
                    :mascot, {:read_only}

Unassigned in drop-down

Streamlined has long had a feature that attempts to detect if you have validations on an association that require it to be filled in. If so, Streamlined removes the “Unassigned” option from the drop-down, preventing the user being presented with an invalid choice. In Edge, we’ve expanded that behavior, and now you can provide a global or per-model override to the text “Unassigned”.

Usage:

user_columns :coach, {:unsassigned_value => 'None'}

Ability to suppress quick delete button from list view

You can now turn off per-row delete buttons in the list view by marking quick_delete_button as false.

Usage:

class TeamUI < Streamlined::UI
   quick_delete_button false
end

Disabling live filtering

You can also disable the display of the filter box on any list view by marking table_filter as false.

Usage:

class TeamUI < Streamlined::UI
   table_filter false
end

That’s a pretty good list for now. We’ll be talking about more changes in upcoming posts. Don’t forget to check out the sample project for real examples of the plugin in action.

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Posted by jgehtland Thu, 03 May 2007 10:01:11 GMT

The big news of the day is the release of our sample project, with documentation on the Wiki. In addition, the feature list is growing, and the team is doing a great job of keeping up with the docs over there now. Its amazing what can happen when you get some extra hands on deck.

We’d like to encourage everyone to look over the docs being released and edit those pages with questions you want answered.

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Posted by jgehtland Wed, 18 Apr 2007 10:34:17 GMT

We’ve officially expanded the team here at Streamlined. We’d like to extend a warm and public welcome to our four new committers: Matthew, Venkat, Glenn and Luis. We expect the pace of change to ramp up, as well as the quality, with these four new eager beavers aboard.

Don’t forget to keep asking questions on the mailing list and posting tickets to Trac. Now, there’s more of us to answer. Yay!

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Posted by jgehtland Fri, 06 Apr 2007 20:18:57 GMT

We’ve just added patches submitted by matthew and ttaylor (thanks, both of you) and fixed a few other tickets. We’ve also moved a few features into the new sandbox section, to clean up the major part of the release.

The next step is a sample project, and then 0.1 goes out the door.

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Posted by jgehtland Thu, 22 Mar 2007 10:32:25 GMT

First of all, thanks to everybody who jumped in on the beta and has been sending comments. We know the code is in high flux, and those who have stuck with it, we appreciate the feedback a lot. Thanks!

Second, I’d like to give some previews to the kinds of changes you will find when we release the new codebase. Perhaps most importantly to a lot of you, the declarative syntax for managing columns and relationships has been simplified and combined. You can expect your old version:

class EmployeeUI < Streamlined::UI
   user_columns :name, :email, :hire_date

   relationship :boss, {:summary => {:name => :name, :fields => [:first_name, :last_name]}
end

to look more like this:

class EmployeeUI < Streamlined::UI
   user_columns  :name, {:link_to=>{:action=>'edit'}}, 
                        :email,
                        :hire_date, {:read_only=>true},
                        :boss, {:show_view=> [:name, {:fields=>[:first_name,:last_name]}]}

   edit_columns   :name, :email
end

As you can see, relationship are combined into columns, and order is maintained across both. So if you moved :boss up to right after :name, the relationship column for :boss would be the second column in the list table.

Also, the optional overrides ‘edit_columns’ and ‘show_columns’ give you a way to specify those subviews. If not specified, they simply inherit from the list view.

You might also notice the addition of :link_to as an option for any column, which can take the standard url_for or RESTful url methods, or a raw URL.

Another major change is that we’ve changed the default behavior for editing/showing to non-Ajax. Instead of Prototype Windows being the default, we’ll use standard redirects. However, switching between the two types is as simple as including the right helper in your controllers. And the decision can be per-controller. For example:

class DepartmentsController < ApplicationController
    acts_as_streamlined
    include Streamlined::Helpers::PrototypeWindowsLinkHelper
end

That will switch the DepartmentsController to use the Prototype Windows-style edit and show behavior. Obviously, to change the style app-wide, you would just include that helper in ApplicationController.

That’s probably enough for this brain dump; look for all of this over on the Trac wiki today, with a downloadable sample project as well.

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