I have been doing some stuff with the XML Builder, and running into
problems whenever I try to debug it with an IDE (trying both Eclipse
and Netbeans). I believe the problem is that the Builder classes
remove all the default instance methods from their objects, including
such basics as .class and .inspect, which breaks the debugger. It
does this by means of the BlankSlate class, which is also used
elsewhere in Rails.
I patched Builder to not use BlankSlate, which fixes my problems but
means I can’t generate XML tags with common method names. That’s OK,
but not a great fix. I wondered if anybody else has encountered this
problem and has a better solution. I’ve heard that 1.9 changes this in
some way.
Oh, and the equality checking methods are also gone! So if you have
an xml builder object, you can’t do equality checks on it because that
will insert <==> tags into your generated XML. Not good.