Rails 2.3.0 RC1: Templates, Engines, Rack, Metal, much more!

Posted by David February 01, 2009 @ 11:40 PM

Rails 2.3 is almost ready for release, but this package is so stock full of amazing new stuff that we’re making dutifully sure that everything works right before we call it official.

So please help us do thorough testing of this release candidate. Lots of the underpinnings changed. Especially the move to Rack. So we need solid testing and will probably have a slightly longer than average release candidate phase to account for that.

But boy will it be worth it. This is one of the most substantial upgrades to Rails in a very long time. A brief rundown of the top hitters:

  • Templates: Allows your new skeleton Rails application to be built your way with your default stack of gems, configs, and more.
  • Engines: Share reusable application pieces complete with routes that Just Work, models, view paths, and the works.
  • Rack: Rails now runs on Rack which gives you access to all the middleware goodness.
  • Metal: Write super fast pieces of optimized logic that routes around Action Controller.
  • Nested forms: Deal with complex forms so much easier.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We’ve put together a complete guide for the Rails 2.3 release notes with much more information.

You can install the release candidate with:

gem install rails --source http://gems.rubyonrails.org

Enjoy, report the bugs, and let’s get Rails 2.3 final out the door soon.

Posted in Releases | 46 comments

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  1. Jerome on 02 Feb 00:22:

    Ah great stuff once again!

    Really looking forward seeing what good use people make of the new engines and templates.

  2. Seth Ladd on 02 Feb 00:32:

    Yay! +1 for engines!

  3. Ghey football fan on 02 Feb 01:31:

    Go cards!!!

  4. Ruby Miner on 02 Feb 01:45:

    Nested model forms ftw!

    My models thank you.

  5. chitsung on 02 Feb 01:47:

    Great Rails!

  6. Florian on 02 Feb 01:56:

    Great, looking forward to it!

  7. Peter on 02 Feb 02:35:

    Are there any examples of the Engines technology?

  8. ari on 02 Feb 07:07:

    Amiel, I think your just one of those multi talented genius kinda guys!

  9. Chris on 02 Feb 07:51:

    You might need to install Rack first: sudo gem install rack

    See: http://m.onkey.org/2008/11/17/ruby-on-rack-1

  10. Attila Györffy on 02 Feb 08:16:

    My models will are happy to see nested forms are back. Also, +1 for Rack and Metal. Stunning release candidate. Can’t wait to test the new functionality.

  11. tex on 02 Feb 08:41:

    Thank you very very very much !

    Are there any news about globalize 2 support?

  12. James Adam on 02 Feb 09:40:

    I’ve written up an explanation of which features from the engines plugin have made it into Rails so far here:

    http://rails-engines.org/news/2009/02/02/engines-in-rails-2-3/

    Hope that’s useful!

  13. Ivan on 02 Feb 09:45:

    Who ever said giving was better than receiving never got a gift like this: NESTED FORMS! I’ve been waiting for this for a very long time. Thanks guys.

  14. Werbeagentur in Aachen on 02 Feb 10:19:

    The news Rails application rock`s. The nested forms are one of the powerfull features for me.

    thx :-)

  15. James Stewart on 02 Feb 10:38:

    Any word on when there’ll be a 2-3 branch on github?

  16. DHH on 02 Feb 10:55:

    James, we won’t branch for 2-3 until it’s out in final. Until then master is the 2-3 branch. But I’ve tagged v2.3.0 at http://github.com/rails/rails/tree/v2.3.0

  17. rb on 02 Feb 13:39:

    I’m going to try it because 2.2.2 is giving me constant authenticity token errors. I’ve worked on this about 7 hours. No I would never cache a formed page and yes I’m using built in form helpers. I’m in a emergency situation here. I went to rescue_action_in_public for that error type and SessionLifetime code but it still isn’t working right. It happens after the users session expires but the part that makes the token expire doesn’t even after refreshing the form or going to other forms on other pages. Restarting the server (software) is only way to get past it and use a form again. It doesn’t even help to close and reopen the browser. It is very odd.

  18. Ollie on 02 Feb 14:10:

    Anybody knows if it’s possible to install this (or even final) version on Instant Rails?

  19. Carl on 02 Feb 14:24:

    Hello@all great work that the ROR Team is doing, it looks like a very promising 2009. I see a leaping Frog hopping off … today is the day a stable version of Ruby 1.9.1 was released, which is really important and I hope many optimizations will follow. What would be really nice is a an easy way to install ROR on Ubuntu like an automatic installation via Synaptic, or even pre-installed. Cheers

  20. wijet on 02 Feb 17:09:

    So great to hear it! was waiting for good nested forms handling, from very long time.

  21. Brandon on 02 Feb 17:27:

    HTTp Digest seems to still be broken. My co-worker is going to explain on lighthouse, but basically, the request.url is being used instead of the uri that is passed in by the client in the credentials hash. The way it stands, digest authentication seems to fail if running the most basic application on localhost.

  22. MVL on 02 Feb 18:33:

    Great Update this is gonna be. The project keeps making huge progress. Really looking forward to 2.3.

    One thing, in development. How can you auto-reload the app/views from a plugin? With config.reload_plugins the other load_paths are reloaded.

  23. (another) Brandon on 02 Feb 22:01:

    This is really loaded with awesome features. One suggestion, though, before 2.3 final is released, is that “templates” be called something a little more specific to distinguish between then and … er, um templates. Normally that term refers to something in the view. Why not call these generator templates or development templates or something like that?

  24. tex on 02 Feb 22:34:

    Great, I just tested models, controllers, views via rails engine and all work great (extending models, controller and overriden views / layouts work too: wonderful !!!!).

    How can I handle static public resources inside rails engine ? (public/images – javascripts – stylesheets)

  25. Scott on 02 Feb 23:02:

    This command

    gem install rails—source http://gems.rubyonrails.org

    Keeps installing 2.2.2, and not 2.3 for me..

    What am I doing wrong..

  26. Eliot on 02 Feb 23:40:

    +1 for not overloading “Templates”. “Application Templates”, while sensible, is also too vague. I like #23’s “Generator Templates”.

  27. Markus on 03 Feb 11:45:

    I would vote for “Application Templates”.

  28. Rida Al Barazi on 03 Feb 12:00:

    Great job guys.. Just upgraded all the apps I’m working on to 2.3

    Don’t you think ‘Rack’ gem should be an included dependency now.

  29. actraiser on 03 Feb 13:14:

    Does somebody else have this problem with the improper implicit Routing of the show-action in rails 2.3.0RC ?

    Somebody already reported this on Lighthouse:

    http://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994/tickets/1856-routes-problem

    Since it is so common to use the idion http://localhost/members/2 instead of http://localhost/members/show/2 the problem must have been spotted by nearly everyone using Rails 2.3.0 or did I miss a change in the routes configuration when reading the release notes?

    Greets -act

  30. cbmeeks on 05 Feb 18:46:

    I upgraded from 2.2.2. First thing I noticed that Webrick is super slow. I mean really slow. As in 40 seconds per click. Even to generate a simple view.

    Version 2.2.2 is instantaneous.

    Any suggestions on where I need to look?

    Thanks.

  31. Steve on 06 Feb 04:42:

    When I try to install from the source it only installs rails and none of the dependencies. Active-support… Not sure what to make of it.

  32. rb on 06 Feb 23:23:

    FYI, after switching to 2.3 RC1.. On my Rails.cache.read attributes—lib/active_support/cache/memory_store.rb was giving me tons of frozen hash errors (from a long used production application) until I commented out .freeze from @data[name] = value.freeze. The Authenticity Token error I discussed on an earlier post on this thread has be fixed. Other than that,smooth sailing. RAILS 2.3 IS AWESOME JUST LIKE ITS PREDECESSORS! Maybe one day I’ll get to the point I can help out. Thanks everyone and JESUS RULES!

  33. Falk on 07 Feb 07:03:

    ruby ruby ruby ruby!

  34. nb on 07 Feb 23:26:

    Did rails just get lonely and want to gobble up the world or what?? haha. First Merb, now Engines. My oh my. Can get snake eat his own whole tail or what.

  35. Fredrik on 09 Feb 08:53:

    This is great news! Can’t wait to test the new nested form feature. It’s always nice to do that in a non hackish way:) One observation though, after upgrading my existing rails 2.2 app, the development environment runs much slower than it used to, any thoughts on that?

  36. Carlos on 09 Feb 18:53:

    So when is the release going to be finalized?

  37. Roamy on 15 Feb 19:39:

    mac rails 2.3 can’t load mysql gem

    ERROR: While executing gem … (Errno::EPERM) Operation not permitted – /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/mysql-2.7/COPYING

    what to do please

    thanks

  38. Sahil on 16 Feb 13:02:

    i installed rails 2.3 today using the source given above. although it installed fine, but it nows sits beside the older 2.2.2

    am using netbeans as the IDE, its able to see that both versions are there, but uses the older 2.2.2

  39. Yoshi on 17 Feb 22:20:

    Please include mysql gem in 2.3 like ver 1.2.6 does. This feature greatly helps developers using mac Xserve servers.

    Thanks.

  40. Danny on 18 Feb 13:18:

    Yoshi: Why not just install the mysql gem yourself it really isnt that hard?

    I’ve tried getting 2.3 RC1 from the source above but it only showing 2.2 as available?

  41. Yoshi on 18 Feb 15:02:

    Danny : Yes. Installing mysql gem is very easy. However, since Leopard running on mac Xserve server comes with 64-bit MySQL and 32 bit Ruby interpreter, the gem cannot be installed properly. To avoid this problem, 32 bit MySQL has to be installed first and eventually there are 2 versions of MySQL just for rails… I love both rails and mac very much, but hate this issue. I am looking forward to 2.3 anyway. Thanks.

  42. Joshua on 20 Feb 09:09:

    Yay. This is great news

  43. XpycT on 20 Feb 18:17:

    Cool! Because my Rails 2.2.2 doesn’t want to start with Ruby 1.9.1, so i hope it will be fixed ))

  44. BernieT on 27 Feb 02:26:

    Most excellent job! I’m not sure how you implemented nested forms (‘cause I’m a lazy bum) but I just tried them with a many-to-many relationship, and realized that they didn’t work. Is there a quick way to get that working, or is that going to make it into the final release? Cheerio! Berns

  45. Piyush Gupta on 27 Feb 05:54:

    Looking forward, 2.3 seems exciting …

    hope nothing breaks .. after upgrading

    Cheers Piyush/Jon

  46. Jesse on 02 Mar 11:39:

    Love is all around :-)

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