I just released version 0.24.0 of Kookaburra to Rubygems.org. While there were no changes to Kookaburra’s API with this release, it is a minor release rather than a patch release, because I removed ActiveSupport from Kookaburra’s dependencies. Previously, Kookaburra depended on ActiveSupport >= 3.0, and this prevented it from working smoothly with Rails 2.x applications (at least in the same Bundler bundle.) Since Kookaburra only used a small fraction of ActiveSupport, it seemed easiest just to break the dependency, so that your application can use whatever version of ActiveSupport it needs.

Because of the fact that ActiveSupport makes a number of modifications to core Ruby classes, if your application does not otherwise explicitly require ActiveSupport, some of these core classes may now behave differently. Specifically, Hash and String core extensions were being used, as well as ActiveSupport::CoreExt::Module::Delegation.

Also, where Kookaburra::JsonApiDriver used ActiveSupport::JSON for encoding and decoding of JSON data, it now uses ::JSON as provided by either the json or the json_pure gems. The tests on Kookaburra itself pass just by swapping out ActiveSupport JSON library for the new one, but these tests do not comprehensively test JSON usage, and there may be differences that impact your application.

Kookaburra declares its dependency on the json_pure gem (a pure-ruby version) in order to ensure that it works cross-platform. However, both json and json_pure are written in such a way that, when you require 'json', it will detect if both libraries are installed and prefer the natively compiled json gem’s version of the library.