Why to wait for rails3, and why not!

Posted on February 10th, 2010 by tim | Filed in ruby and on rails

Rails3 is on its way and everybody is just waiting for its release. But what can you do in the meantime to cure some obvious mistakes of the current version?

We decided to pick out 3 nice parts of rails3 and use them right now - we just couldn't wait any longer.

  • Bundler The rails gem feature was just a big error. You require a gem, then you want to run rake gem:install and this throws an error because it is missing a gem. Where is the point? Bundler is independent from rails, it is a simple but sufficient solution to really get going with gems (vs. rails plugins). We installed it some time ago and we had few problems since. Only moving to the newest version of bundler made some noise. The rest was just great.

  • XSS A change under the hood. Rails 3 will escape all output, the developer has to explicitly state what not to escape. Until now it was the other way around. This small plugin (http://github.com/nzkoz/rails_xss ) and a switch from erb to erubis (erubis is also faster, by the way) made this very simple

  • UJS Why should you spend time writing rjs or doing all jQuery AJAX by hand? We eagerly waited for the jquery-ujs javascript code and now finally it is out. This is just perfect, download it, add it to your project and start writing nice new mark-up and everything works better. In Rails3 the linkto and formfor helper will even generate the markup, but that is the minor part of the change. The important step is: no rjs anymore and better jquery-ajax code. Great.

These are great new developments and it is easy to use them right now in your project. Just do it.

The other features we are still waiting for:

  • new routing
  • complete rack support
  • a plugin API
  • active model and new active record
  • a more complete i18n support
  • new railties, especially better rails engines support and system events
  • no more aliasmethodchain, instead module, mixin and classes .. why and why2 ... this just makes so much more sense...

a very good overview about all new features and changes by ryan daigle .. from edgerails.info

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