Recently the online open documentation for ruby on rails has under gone a make over, see http://guides.rails.info/ for the latest set. This now provides a really good starting point to learning the underlying framework to biorails.

Also for fans of microsoft visual studio there is a new all in one IDE from SapphireSteel (see http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Ruby-In-Steel-New-Free-Edition) this provide a single install to setup, ide, rails, ruby, mysql etc. Its good to see that all major development IDE now have solid support for ruby on rails available.

As biorails is now a large rails project, a simplified training example has been added to get started with
can get found at:-

http://biorails.org/svn/biorails/contrib/chemreg/

This is build so its really easy to covert this into a chemical inventory plugin in biorails. As long expected integrating into existing chemical inventory is most common customization for BioRails. This project provide a simple application to manage compound,batch, sample and containers.

A number of improvements written implemented in the Enterprise edition are being integrated into the Core product. These include

• UI changes with more Tabs and better arrangement of information generally.
• Lots of minor changes from customer feedback
• Move to access control lists for security

Currently the code is changing rapidly as working on getting all 2000 functional tests to pass with integrated changes.

New Redmine Base Site¶

This enables much better management of multiple projects. The core site has moved from trac to redmine see http://redmine.org. This provide much better issue managemnt and add forums,news and rss feeds etc. Even better was a ruby application it work well and hogs a lot less memory then the older trac system.

Migrations

• All tickets have been moved across for all the various project related trac sites. Old ticket references can be seen in the external_ref field in the new system of the format trac:project:nnn.
• Wiki pages under went some heavy gardening to clean up the information and update information. They should reflect the 3.x code base better now and be much better organized.
• User account and authorization is same as before

New Features

• Project can be private or public.
• Users project like biorails4office, morpthit, customer project should appear after login
• issue ticket can be enter of difference tracker for public-bugs, public-feature and private per project tickets
• people can monitor issue,news etc via rss
• forums are added for FAQ etc.

The BioRails Team is currently working on a 3.1 release.
See road map for details.

The Core wiki has been populated with sections on:

1. Project
2. Guides
3. Modules
4. Development
5. Glossary
6. Getting Involved

Instructions for setting up a development environment are posted here.

These instructions are tested against Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.0.4.1 JeOS and a MySQL database. There is also a demo.db available in SQLite (export RAILS_ENV=demo)

With the 3.0 release of BioRails we have move to a new issue management application which allows us to consolidate all the tickets from the different customers.