Ruby on Rails 3.0, an upgrade to the popular Web development framework that features a merger with the Merb framework, has just gone into a beta release, according to a blog post on the Ruby on Rails Web site this week.
The release incorporates Merb ideas, resulting in performance and speed boosts. The planned merger with Merb first was revealed around Christmas of 2008.
Among the features in the 3.0 upgrade is a new router with an emphasis on RESTful declarations as well as a new Action Mailer API and an Active Record chainable query language built on top of relational algebra.
“You thought we were never going to get to this day, didn’t you? Ye of little faith,” the blog post said. “Because here is the first real, public release of Rails 3.0 in the form of a beta package that we’ve toiled long and hard over.”
(The blog post is attributed to “David,” which presumably would be Rails founder David Heinemeier Hansson, who could not be reached for comment on Thursday night.)
“It’s surely not perfect yet, but we were out of blockers on the list, so here we go. Please give it a run around the block, try to update some old applications, try to start some new ones, and report back all the issues you find,” the post continued.
“I’m really proud of this moment, actually. We’ve had more than 250 people help with the release and we’ve been through almost 4,000 commits since [Rails] 2.3 to get here. Yet still the new version feels lighter, more agile, and easier to understand. It’s a great day to be a Rails developer,” the post said.
Rails 3.0 also offers unobtrusive JavaScript helpers with drivers for Prototype and JQuery. Explicit dependency management is featured as well, via a Bundler capability.
Release notes for Rails 3.0 are available. The general release of Rails 3.0 is planned for later this quarter.