I’m glad to announce the coming release of a new Rails plugin, Seed Me.
It was developed with the intent to fix one of Rails’ flaws when it comes to migrations; it is possible to define precisely what the data structure of an application is going to look like, but it lacks data itself.
This plugin is intented to fill that gap, thus allowing Rails developers to create migrations and the data that go with them. This, to me, is a more natural system then the Rails seeds which is defined at some point.
The difference is more than minor. Seed Me will allow a better tracking of all the data that go into an application, similarly to how migrations document the intention of the data abstraction. At the end of the day, a living system which contains all essential data is a God-sent to any tester or quality assurance specialist.
The other difference is that the Seed Me plugin is better suited to take existing, important application data and commit it into a duplicatable data strategy. If Seed Me data migrations allow a tracking of intentions, then any Seed that isn’t linked to a migration is necessarily ‘core application’.
The team is expecting to release this during the coming week. Stay tuned.
