August 20, 2009, 6:56 am
From Part 1:
One of the reasons I enjoy working with Rails is its dynamism. Everything about the platform bristles with energy: The community is helpful, charitable, and gregarious; the Ruby language is chock-full of tricks; and the tools and libraries available to developers seemingly leap forward every day. Indeed, it takes little time before some laborious task is encapsulated in a handy gem or reduced to shorthand in the Rails core. For example, I wrote previously about named scopes, application templates, and enhanced finders, all incremental improvements to technique, but nonetheless helpful.
Recently, another batch of valuable and time-saving enhancements was added to ‚ÄúEdge,‚Äù the leading-edge version of Rails that‚Äôs something of a proving ground for new features, and some merit a sneak peek and early adoption. Let‚Äôs quickly set up an Edge Rails environment and give the new bells and whistles a go for the rest of the week. Today, let‚Äôs look at conveniences for validation and the integration of a state machine into ActiveRecord…
