Hi --
Please have a look at this:
and tell me whether you think it's potentially interesting, useful, cool, etc. (Line wrapping may be making it unclear, but that can be tweaked.)
I've added some running commentary to AR::Base, so that you get a kind of guided tour as to what's happening. I suspect that this might be useful to people who are starting to get to know the Rails source code. I'd like a little feedback before I go nuts with it, though.
David
Neat! I could also see it being useful in those cases where you're trying to trace through something weird happening in rails, and having that output rather than just stepping through the code (mentally or via a debugger) could be pretty helpful.
Fred
Would be great David.
Having a commented method chain would benefit plugin development as well. The Rails source is structured pretty well, but still it can be a pain sometimes finding out what the ideal plugin solution to a problem is.
Best regards
Peter De Berdt
Hi David,
David A. Black wrote:
I suspect that this might be useful to people who are starting to get to know the Rails source code. I'd like a little feedback before I go nuts with it, though.
Very cool. I think it'll be very useful in that respect, and probably in others as well.
Best regards, Bill
I think it's a wonderful idea.
This would be awesome for training. Instead of having to explain every little detail over and over, you could cover it once and then have your students install the plugin for when they're toying around on their own.
Great stuff!
--Jeremy
As an "advanced newbie" who is trying to get his head around the internals of Rails right now, I have to say: this looks very cool, indeed!
I just want to add my support behind this project. Also, may I recommend putting it up on a public repository (ahem.. GitHub) so others can contribute because I think the idea is of great use for newbies and experts alike.
I think it's a great idea on a number of fronts. In addition to the ideas above I can see it aiding debugging where some unknown-to-us 'Rails magic' jumped in at an unexpected place.
Thanks to you and a few others, I also spend a fair bit of time reading through the Rails source and I can see your talkative rails comments helping to illuminate some of the more esoteric code.
I'm sure you've already considered this but the one thing I'd want to make sure is that I could turn the feature on and off. I'd be concerned about the logs getting populated with the ARec::Base comments. Even if they were only 'on' in development they could potentially mask bottlenecks when you're trying to tune the app.
Great work (again)!
Hi --
I think it's a great idea on a number of fronts. In addition to the ideas above I can see it aiding debugging where some unknown-to-us 'Rails magic' jumped in at an unexpected place.
Thanks to you and a few others, I also spend a fair bit of time reading through the Rails source and I can see your talkative rails comments helping to illuminate some of the more esoteric code.
I'm sure you've already considered this but the one thing I'd want to make sure is that I could turn the feature on and off. I'd be concerned about the logs getting populated with the ARec::Base comments. Even if they were only 'on' in development they could potentially mask bottlenecks when you're trying to tune the app.
I haven't figured out how I want to engineer it entirely yet, but I'm
leaning toward having it be either a monster plugin, or even a
separate distribution. It definitely would be engineered so that you'd
have to decide you want to turn it on, and it would mainly be geared
for use in the console (or some as-yet-unimagined visually integrated
extravaganza 
Great work (again)!
Thanks!
David
Hi --
I think it's a great idea on a number of fronts. In addition to the ideas above I can see it aiding debugging where some unknown-to-us 'Rails magic' jumped in at an unexpected place.
Thanks to you and a few others, I also spend a fair bit of time reading through the Rails source and I can see your talkative rails comments helping to illuminate some of the more esoteric code.
I'm sure you've already considered this but the one thing I'd want to make sure is that I could turn the feature on and off. I'd be concerned about the logs getting populated with the ARec::Base comments. Even if they were only 'on' in development they could potentially mask bottlenecks when you're trying to tune the app.
I haven't figured out how I want to engineer it entirely yet, but I'm leaning toward having it be either a monster plugin, or even a separate distribution.
Sounds like the sort of thing where git is a very good thing. The only
thing I have doubts about is the maintainability of this, as I imagine
that it would be a substantial ongoing task to keep on top of changes
to rails.
Fred