Ruby on Rails 2.1 Released

Posted by Robert Bazinet on Jun 02, 2008 09:00 AM

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Ruby on Rails 2.1 was released this past week at the annual Ruby on Rails conference, RailsConf.  This year the event was held in Portland, OR and the announcement came as many people expected.

The announcement was made official by Jeremy Kemper, Rails core team member, at the end of his talk at RailsConf.  Details of the release are outlined on the Riding Rails blog and include the following:

Rails 2.1 is now available for general consumption with all the features and fixes we’ve been putting in over the last six months since 2.0. This has been a huge effort by a very wide range of contributors helping to make it happen.

Over the past six months, we’ve had 1,400 contributors creating patches and vetting them. This has resulted in 1,600+ patches. A truly staggering number. And lots of that has made it into this release.

New features
The new major features are:

• Time zones (by Geoff Buesing): Tutorial | Introdction | Railscast
• Dirty tracking: Introduction (partial updates) | Railscast
• Gem Dependencies: Introduction | Railscast
• Named scope (by Nick Kallen): Introduction | Railscast
• UTC-based migrations: Introduction | Railscast
• Better caching: Introduction

Thanks to Ryan Daigle for the feature introductions and Ryan Bates for the Railscasts. It makes writing the release notes so much easier :).

As always, you can install with:

gem install rails

...or you can use the Git tag for 2.1.0.

None of these features stand out as the killer feature for this release but instead represents a group of steady, solid improvements focusing on pain points for many developers.   Installing the update is straightforward and should go without issues.

The announcement includes Railscasts to show the main new updates which gives developers a visual look at what is new, before they update their Rails installations.

More information about this release are available on the Ruby on Rails web site.

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   Thanks god

   Jun 3, 2008 1:56 AM by 凉粉 小刀

   there aren't any killer features in this release...

   Reply

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   Re: Thanks god

   Jun 3, 2008 8:11 AM by Eric Pugh

   I disagree.. I think the time zone stuff is amazing. Any time you build a web app that shows when things happen, and have more then one timezone, life gets very hard. And I think the time zone support that Ruby has is pretty rough (http://www.opensourceconnections.com/2007/04/09/figuring-out-the-local-timezone-in-ruby-on-osx/. So putting a great timezone layer into Rails seems to me to be one of those great "Why I use Rails: Time Zones!" kind of features.

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   Re: Thanks god

   Jun 3, 2008 9:33 AM by Robert Bazinet

   Well, this is a killer feature for someone needing it but it is not a huge feature for everyone, only when it's a pain point for some users. Each feature here seems to be that type of update, but that is my opinion.

   Reply

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   Killer features?

   Jun 4, 2008 3:41 AM by Maximilian Schulz

   Probably there are no killer features, but they really help a distributed development team. Especially the "gem dependencies" and the "utc-based migrations" will make things much easier as soon as more than one developer is working on a project (as well as deployment). Personally, my favorite feature are "named scopes" (aka has_finder). I love them! ;)

   Reply

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