As announced in the previous article we will look at a complete number class today. I will use the example of a integer number which, when printed, will show up as hex number (as opposed to the decimal presentation of Fixnum and relatives). As before the main point is not sophisticated logic or usefulness of the class. Instead I will keep the logic simple so we can focus on the aspects I try to convey with today’s article:

Upgrading applications is good sport and all, but everyone knows that greenfielding is where the real fun is. At least, I love greenfielding stuff a lot more than dealing with old ghetto cruft that has 1,900 test failures (and 300 errors), 20,000 line controllers, and code that I’m pretty sure is actually a demon-brand of PHP.

I’ve been working on revamping the Active Record query interface for the last few weeks ( while taking some time off in India from consulting work, before joining 37signals ), building on top of Emilio’s GSOC project of integrating ARel and ActiveRecord. So here’s an overview of how things are going to work in Rails 3.

Now that we’ve looked at some of the core architecture, I’d like to shift my focus first to upgrading an application. Originally I had planned on writing about upgrading plugins first, but apparently that API isn’t quite stable. So, I figured rather than write a blog post that will be deprecated in 2 weeks, I’d rather write one that will be deprecated in 3-6 months instead.

A few weeks ago I moved this blog over to Swirrl’s own open-source Rails+CouchDB blog engine, SemanticJournal (At Swirrl, we like to call it ‘Semjo’ for short).

As well as the standard blogging features, Semjo includes some Semantic Web features, in the form of helpers to aid with marking up elements on public-facing pages with RDFa (such as the date, author, title of articles etc).