Rails 2.3 - best release ever?
I have been using Ruby on Rails since the 1.1 release, and there have been more and less successful releases since. Rails 1.2 was amazing and brought us REST - most of us never looked back. However, the 1.2 series was still very buggy and was breaking backward compatibility several times between minor releases.
I wasn’t too much excited about Rails 2.0, particularly because it wasn’t backward-compatible and most of plugins had to wait for several months to be rewritten to work with 2.0. However, since then, Rails is evolving quite nicely and version 2.3 seems to be best you could ever get in Ruby web applications development. And here is why:
nested model mass-assignment significantly simplifies building complicated forms. At the time of writing, it’s still a bit buggy when it comes to validation (in RC1), but that is about to change before final release.
http digest authentication which is great news for everyone who build web services and need a bit more security in place.
metal, using which we can finally bypass routing monster and save some milliseconds for “mission-critical” requests.
overall performance boost, as pointed out by one of my friends. I didn’t see any benchmarks yet but overall feeling, especially with environment startup and running rake tasks is astonishing.
Now, let’s just wait for 3.0 revolution to come…