Rails 2.1 changes that make living with Ext JS easier

I just like to point out a few changes of the soon to be released Rails 2.1 which I caught via Chu Yeow's Living on the edge blog series.

Automatically parse posted JSON content for Mime::JSON requests
The most important change is probably the automatically parsing of JSON requests into the params hash.
Here's the example from Chu Yeows's post:

# http request
POST /posts
{"post": {"title": "Breaking News"}}

# controller action code
def create
  @post = Post.create params[:post]
end

Similar functionality is also provided by the json_request plugin which I use currently with Rails 2.0.2.

json_escape for escaping HTML entities in JSON strings
In the same post, Chu Yeow is mentioning the addition of json_escape:

json_escape("is a > 0 & a < 10?")
# => is a \u003E 0 \u0026 a \u003C 10?

# or you can use the alias j in your erb/haml templates:
<%=j @person.to_json %>

Right know I can't think of another use as Chu Yeow's example for documenting a JSON api.

Custom JavaScript and stylesheet symbols
You all know javascript_include_tag :defaults, which includes your application.js and prototype files.
Now you can define your own symbols, such as :extjs.

See here for details of this change.
This addition is similar to my little helper I use in my projects which I described in my ext-all.js or ext-all-debug.js post.

Haml 2.0
By the way, because I mentioned haml, today Haml 2.0 was released, which includes a javascript filter. Check out the blog post for more info.