Who is the maintainer for Active Resource? and/or who is interested in working on it?

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Nick Urban

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May 12, 2011, 5:49:04 PM5/12/11
to Ruby on Rails: Core
There are a number of additional features I required for a current
project. I was able to solve some of these by using "Reactive
Resource" (https://github.com/justinweiss/reactive_resource) but many
I had to implement as override of various sorts. It seems like a
better solution would be to build some more flexibility into Active
Resource itself.

I notice that Active Resource hasn't really changed since 3.0.0. Is
anybody working on this right now? Is there a maintainer I should talk
to regarding potential patches?

Thanks,

Nick

Prem Sichanugrist

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May 12, 2011, 5:54:32 PM5/12/11
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[Disclaimer: I'm not a core team member]

I think if you would, It'd be great if you'd fork it and maintain it. I don't really see much effort to it either, and I don't know how to *patch* it since I'm not using it regularly.

I think I'd then try to convince the core team to remove it, and then suggest people to use that gem instead.

- Prem

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Nick Urban

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May 12, 2011, 7:09:28 PM5/12/11
to Ruby on Rails: Core
I don't have a good idea of the pros and cons of turning Active
Resource into a gem, but if that were to happen, it does seem like
Active Resource might become more free to evolve quickly and
independently of the rest of Rails. Perhaps someone who is more
knowledgeable could comment further.

Nick

Paul Campbell

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May 12, 2011, 7:14:21 PM5/12/11
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ActiveResource has always promised great things, but it's still
something of a dream.

I'd love to see some progress. Particularly against the context of
things like Paul Dix's book
http://www.amazon.com/Service-Oriented-Design-Rails-Addison-Wesley-Professional/dp/0321659368

—P

--

Paul Campbell
pa...@hypertiny.ie
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
web http://hypertiny.ie
blog http://www.pabcas.com
twitter http://www.twitter.com/paulca
github http://www.github.com/paulca
phone +353 87 914 8162
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Ryan BIgg

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May 12, 2011, 7:23:00 PM5/12/11
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I'm working with ActiveResource at the moment and I do find it a bit lacking personally. Having to implement the find_by_* methods myself is one of my prime annoyances at the moment.

Perhaps a group of people could get together and work on fixing up the annoyances people have with it?

Nicolás Sanguinetti

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May 12, 2011, 7:36:24 PM5/12/11
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On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 8:23 PM, Ryan BIgg <radarl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm working with ActiveResource at the moment and I do find it a bit lacking
> personally. Having to implement the find_by_* methods myself is one of my
> prime annoyances at the moment.
> Perhaps a group of people could get together and work on fixing up the
> annoyances people have with it?

It'd be nice to get some input from the core team on this, but I've
always seen ActiveResource as the "almost unused" part of rails. It's
useful (mostly) when you have another rails app providing the web
service, and that's not always the case (when you don't, you usually
need to add enough glue around that it ends up being easier to use
something else.)

Has the core team thought about splitting ActiveResource out of the
main rails framework, as ActionWebService did a while back?

-foca

Ryan BIgg

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May 12, 2011, 7:41:24 PM5/12/11
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FYI: I don't mention it in Rails 3 in Action because there's better alternatives, such as HTTParty (or if you're desperate, Typhoeus + Nokogiri) for connecting to external web services.

tl;dr: ActiveResource is a ghetto. Please fix.

wangyh....@gmail.com

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May 12, 2011, 11:37:28 PM5/12/11
to Ruby on Rails: Core
I don't understand

Pierre Lancien

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May 13, 2011, 4:42:08 AM5/13/11
to Ruby on Rails: Core
Hi,

Just a testimony here, as I stumble upon this thread.
Two years ago, my team and I worked on a complex back-office for a
client : a modular sales and customer management system, dealing with
offers, sales, payment, hotline, archive of communications with the
customer. We did it with Rails and we had about 15 different
applications interconnected with webservices. We had to deal with
shared authentication, intranet accounts, rights management, sending
Objects between applications (but with different attributes, depending
on who is asking). A front-end allowed to search, edit and create a
lot of things, and more than often a hotliner action on the frontend
could trigger 10 applications in the back before getting the final
result. To do this we used ActiveRessource.

Unfortunately we didn't take the time to give feedbacks to the Rails
community about this project, but here are some bulletpoints :
- we had a very hard time finding solutions to our problems on the
internet. It seems that very, very few people are using
ActiveRessource and Rails to construct complex systems.
- If we let aside all the observations like "You should have used Java
instead" that we received from some externals, I should point out that
ActiveRessource has been pretty disappointing, and we could clearly
see how far it is from the rest of Rails features in term of quality.
We felt that only few people actually use it.
- we had to patch for some issues and we wrote several plug-ins to
help us communicate between apps. We had to code it quick and we now
that the quality level of our coding was not enough to submit these
things to the Rails community. In a sense we lacked confidence. But
the thing is : ActiveRessource is far from being enough to do serious
work with several Rails apps, it's still experimental in my opinion.
And since my project two years ago, it has not evolved a lot.

I think that it would be a good move to make it an external gem, and
if a core-team member or a serious Rails committer takes the lead, I'm
ready to help and to rework on some patches we did.

Pierre

Ryan Bigg

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May 13, 2011, 7:06:53 AM5/13/11
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Please do submit these patches to the Rails project itself. It doesn't matter if you think are poorly written. They will be reviewed and you will get feedback on them, learning how to write better code and understand the Rails code as you do it.

You're not learning if you're not doing.

Mike Gehard

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May 13, 2011, 11:05:44 AM5/13/11
to Ruby on Rails: Core
My $0.02...

+1 for splitting ActiveResource into a gem that is outside of the
core.

As Ryan Bigg says below, there are better alternatives and removing it
from the core wouldn't force those that are using something else to
have it laying around. It would also allow it to be versioned
independently as it seems to have a lifecycle of its' own.


On May 12, 7:36 pm, Nicolás Sanguinetti <h...@nicolassanguinetti.info>
wrote:
> On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 8:23 PM, Ryan BIgg <radarliste...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'm working with ActiveResource at the moment and I do find it a bit lacking
> > personally. Having to implement the find_by_* methods myself is one of my
> > prime annoyances at the moment.
> > Perhaps a group of people could get together and work on fixing up the
> > annoyances people have with it?
>
> It'd be nice to get some input from the core team on this, but I've
> always seen ActiveResource as the "almost unused" part of rails. It's
> useful (mostly) when you have another rails app providing the web
> service, and that's not always the case (when you don't, you usually
> need to add enough glue around that it ends up being easier to use
> something else.)
>
> Has the core team thought about splitting ActiveResource out of the
> main rails framework, as ActionWebService did a while back?
>
> -foca
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Friday, 13 May 2011 at 9:14 AM, Paul Campbell wrote:
>
> > ActiveResource has always promised great things, but it's still
> > something of a dream.
>
> > I'd love to see some progress. Particularly against the context of
> > things like Paul Dix's book
> >http://www.amazon.com/Service-Oriented-Design-Rails-Addison-Wesley-Pr...
>
> > —P
> > p...@hypertiny.ie
> > - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> > webhttp://hypertiny.ie
> > bloghttp://www.pabcas.com
> > twitterhttp://www.twitter.com/paulca
> > githubhttp://www.github.com/paulca

Guillermo Iguaran

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May 13, 2011, 9:49:31 PM5/13/11
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I totally agree, ActiveResource needs to be resurrected either within or out of the framework as independent project.

There is even a very interesting pull request (to add initial support for associations) waiting for review:

Nick Urban

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May 16, 2011, 11:12:18 AM5/16/11
to Ruby on Rails: Core
So this brings me back to my initial question: who is in charge of
this right now? If we wanted to make a gem, as everyone seems to be
suggesting, how would the transition happen?

On May 13, 7:49 pm, Guillermo Iguaran <guilleigua...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I totally agree, ActiveResource needs to be resurrected either within or out of the framework as independent project.
>
> There is even a very interesting pull request (to add initial support for associations) waiting for review:
>
> https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/230
>
> --
> Guillermo Iguaran
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 6:36 PM, Nicolás Sanguinetti wrote:
> > On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 8:23 PM, Ryan BIgg <radarliste...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > I'm working with ActiveResource at the moment and I do find it a bit lacking
> > > personally. Having to implement the find_by_* methods myself is one of my
> > > prime annoyances at the moment.
> > > Perhaps a group of people could get together and work on fixing up the
> > > annoyances people have with it?
>
> > It'd be nice to get some input from the core team on this, but I've
> > always seen ActiveResource as the "almost unused" part of rails. It's
> > useful (mostly) when you have another rails app providing the web
> > service, and that's not always the case (when you don't, you usually
> > need to add enough glue around that it ends up being easier to use
> > something else.)
>
> > Has the core team thought about splitting ActiveResource out of the
> > main rails framework, as ActionWebService did a while back?
>
> > -foca
>
> > > On Friday, 13 May 2011 at 9:14 AM, Paul Campbell wrote:
>
> > > ActiveResource has always promised great things, but it's still
> > > something of a dream.
>
> > > I'd love to see some progress. Particularly against the context of
> > > things like Paul Dix's book
> > >http://www.amazon.com/Service-Oriented-Design-Rails-Addison-Wesley-Pr...
>
> > > —P
> > > p...@hypertiny.ie
> > > - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> > > webhttp://hypertiny.ie
> > > bloghttp://www.pabcas.com
> > > twitterhttp://www.twitter.com/paulca
> > > githubhttp://www.github.com/paulca

Prem Sichanugrist

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May 16, 2011, 11:14:38 AM5/16/11
to rubyonra...@googlegroups.com
I've extracted it to another project and remove it from the Rails source yesterday. I sent the pull request and got closed right away.

So it seems like someone has to maintain it.

Ryan Bigg

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May 16, 2011, 11:19:10 AM5/16/11
to rubyonra...@googlegroups.com
Jason Stirk and I are working on a rewrite of Active Resource at Railsconf. We're looking for help too, so if you're here come catch up with us and we'll talk.

Nick Urban

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May 16, 2011, 11:39:36 AM5/16/11
to Ruby on Rails: Core
I created a google group for Active Resource.

Please join if you're interested in contributing. I always set big
groups on digest or no-email and miss most of the discussion, but I
want to receive actual messages about Active Resource development. By
having a high signal-to-noise list, hopefully we can keep the
conversation focused and build some momentum.

http://groups.google.com/group/active-resource

Thanks,

Nick

On May 16, 9:19 am, Ryan Bigg <radarliste...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > For more options, visit this group athttp://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-core?hl=en.

Jamie Rumbelow

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May 16, 2011, 11:18:43 AM5/16/11
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I'll offer to maintain it, I've been looking for a chance to get involved with Rails in a better way. I'm a student stuck in the middle of exams right now, but am starting a job heading up the dev team on a Ruby/Rails project in a couple of months so will be involved heavily then. I know the guys behind the new company really want to be contributing to open source, and I certainly do, so they will be resources backed to helping maintain it. 

How does this kind of thing usually work? Does it involve some kind of interview, or is it just a "first come, first serve" take it or leave it basis?

Jamie

---------------
Jamie Rumbelow
Writer, Speaker, Geek

Prem Sichanugrist

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May 16, 2011, 2:02:19 PM5/16/11
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It's more like a "get your pull request in, we'll review it thing. Go ahead and send us pull request ;)

Sent from my iPad

markusschwed

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May 16, 2011, 2:12:02 PM5/16/11
to Ruby on Rails: Core
Hello guys,

I'm working (with a friend of mine) on improving ActiveResource.
Currently, we work at this pull request and we're adding a belongs_to
method for finishing it:

https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/230

I would love to see that ActiveResource stay in Rails core and get
more attention by it's maintainers because it has a lot of potential
to become a really usefull piece of software,
but even if it get moved into a new gem we will continue developing on
it.

What do you guys think about it?

Greetz
Markus
> > > For more options, visit this group athttp://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-core?hl=en.

Nick Urban

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May 17, 2011, 12:35:24 PM5/17/11
to Ruby on Rails: Core
I'm happy with whatever the consensus is (gem or core).

I'd like to suggest we make a list of features which AR should have
and doesn't and then we can figure out what sort of changes will
support those features and not duplicate each other's efforts.

The problems which I have had to deal with in my own code are:
- converting to/from camel case
- resource paths with no extension
- being able to specify which attributes are sent instead of sending
them all

Wishlist:
- Hooks!
- Expand the power of the "schema" (possibly fold in the feature that
lets you send / ignore certain attributes)

I understand Markus is working on associations. Reactive Resource also
adds associations.

Ryan and Pierre, I'm curious what features you are adding.

Thanks,

Nick

Nick Urban

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May 17, 2011, 4:13:40 PM5/17/11
to Ruby on Rails: Core
Oh, another thing I've added which would be great to have built-in is
easily toggleable request logging, so you can see what's happening,
and warnings when requests look suspicious (e.g. missing a path
parameter).
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Gaston Ramos

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May 21, 2011, 11:51:55 PM5/21/11
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El Mon, 16 de May de 2011, a las 11:12:02AM -0700, markusschwed dijo:

> Hello guys,
>
> I'm working (with a friend of mine) on improving ActiveResource.
> Currently, we work at this pull request and we're adding a belongs_to
> method for finishing it:

Hi, I sent a pull request before your pull request that adds some basic
associations to ARes and it has belongs_to see:

https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/70

--
"Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of
course: laziness, impatience, and hubris."

(Larry Wall)


+-------------------------------------+
Gastón Ramos
http://gastonramos.com.ar/
GNU/Linux Counter user #450312

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