Facets 2.9 is fairly extensive as it was originally intended to be v3.0. After further consideration it was decided to reserve v3.0 for something a little bolder (to be announced). The primary goal of this release was to trim Facets down to a true core extensions library. All tertiary add-on classes and mixins have now been spun-off to other projects. Only a very select set of general purposes classes and mixins remain.
Facets 2.8 effectively completes the MORE library clean-up which peaked with the previous 2.7 release. In so doing, five additional libraries have been deprecated:
Three other libraries have been deprecated, but have been spun-off to the new 'ansi' project:
Facets 2.7 is most significant release of Facets since 2.4. Rather then trickle-release these changes over the course of the 2.6.x series, I made the decision to let 2.7 have them all at once. In so doing this release nearly completes the process of trimming down the MORE library to its essentials. Over 40 high-level libraries have been spun-off as separate gems and/or deprecated. No doubt this is a big change for Facets, and the transition may be a bit bumpy over the short-term, but I am certain that in the long-run everyone involved will be better served. To help, I have listed the effected libraries and the alternate gems available to take their place.
The old Ruby Facets website was a static 100% XML/XSLT site. When I originally created the site, I though XML/XSLT suredly was the pinnicale and proper way to build a modern site --for no other reason that XSL is a pain in the ass! Well, we all know the ultimate outcome of this story. XML/XSLT is turning out to be an exmplar of over engineering by academics.
The new Facets website runs of Jekyll, a static site generator supoprted by GitHub. (another good site tool is Shunman)
Facets 2.4.3 is now out in the wild. The release is primarily a maintenance release —fixing a handful of small bugs and adding some small feature improvements, but a few significant changes are also present.
Note that this release does not include a setup.rb script. We are working on a new version of this script, which we plan to include in the next release.
As programmers are wont to do, I started collecting reusable pieces of Ruby long ago. At first it was just a small function here, a useful module there. Eventually the collection became sizable and I called it TomsLib. As time wore on and my library grew, I started to feel it worth a general release and I had renamed it Raspberry Lib. But sometime shortly thereafter I hit upon the idea of atomicity of the core extensions. And that's how the name Facets came about --it's all about the little things. Of course, that name took a while to decide upon too. The library was almost called "Atomix & Trix"!
