Getting Involved and Rails 3 Observations

Hello -

I would like to get involved in the Rails Core development. What’s the process for getting involved?

We’ve been working with Rails since 2006 and really enjoy the framework but have some reservations around Rails 3’s REST implementation and exposed Java Script. The former seems to be an over reach for a framework and is an application specific architectural decision. The latter takes something that should be handled by the framework (wrapped and tested) and exposes it. Migrating one project, both have made working with the framework slower, more cumbersome and overly complex.

I’m not sure what you mean by “REST implementation”. Sure, there’s some syntactic sugar available if you’re using the idiomatic approach - but there’s nothing stopping you from ignoring all that and doing things manually. From what I recall, that sugar isn’t even new (dating back to early Rails 2)…

Even less clear on “exposed Javascript” - is that an issue with the asset pipeline, with the Rails UJS helpers, or something else?

We have 10’s of thousands of line applications that eventually need to be upgraded. We need to make and bake some core changes to make this possible. This should not effect the current Rails implementation but enable simple, direct migrations and make the framework more flexible for new projects. I’m fairly certain in our case it’s quicker (and safer) to make these changes to Rails proper than to rewrite our apps. Since I’m positive we’re not alone on this front, we would like to share that work.

rails-core is definitely the place to bring issues like this up, but I don’t think you’ll get much traction if you want to introduce any changes that break existing applications. You may be better off starting with a gem that changes the offending behaviors that you can include into your applications to smooth the migration process.

–Matt Jones