This Week in Edge Rails

Posted by Mike Gunderloy November 28, 2008 @ 05:33 PM

Yesterday was Thanksgiving holiday for US-based developers – but it certainly hasn’t looked like a holiday week in edge Rails. Things are moving fast, with some major changes afoot for version 2.3 of Rails.

Rack integration

The underpinnings of script/server have been simplified and rewritten somewhat. The explicit list of supported servers that used to be in script/server is gone. Instead, Rails now depends on the installation of Rack, and script/server goes through this – which means that Rails supports any server that Rack does.

Efficient routes

Routing sees a couple of big changes this week. The formatted_ route helpers are gone, in favor just passing in :format as an option. This cuts down the route generation process by 50% for any resource – and can save a substantial amount of memory (up to 100MB on large applications, according to the Lighthouse ticket ) If your code uses the formatted_ helpers, it will still work for the time being – but that behavior is deprecated and your application will be more efficient if you rewrite those routes using the new standard. Another big change is that Rails now supports multiple routing files, not just routes.rb. You can use RouteSet#add_configuration_file to bring in more routes at any time – without clearing the currently-loaded routes. commit commit

Better support for engine plugins

The second routing change enables better support for Rails Engines: routing files in engines are automatically loaded and reloaded now (as are those in other plugins). Engines are getting some love other than routing. If your plugin has an app folder, then app/[models|controllers|helpers] will automatically be added to the Rails load path. There’s active discussion of just how this should work, and how much to pick up from the current engines plugins, so it’s likely we haven’t seen the last commits in this area. Engines also support adding view paths now. commit commit commit commit

Sensible backtraces for your tests

If you’re a fan of the Thoughtbot Quiet Backtrace plugin, which allows you to selectively remove lines from Test::Unit backtraces, you’ll be happy to find ActiveSupport::BacktraceCleaner and Rails::BacktraceCleaner in core. This supports both filters (to perform regex-based substitutions on backtrace lines) and silencers (to remove backtrace lines entirely). Rails automatically adds silencers to get rid of the most common noise in a new application, and builds a config/backtrace_silencers.rb file to hold your own additions. commit

Ruby 1.9 integration

A variety of commits continue the drive towards Ruby 1.9 and minitest compatibility. This should ensure that Rails 2.3 is ready to handle the latest Ruby underpinnings when it’s released. Those on the bleeding edge at the moment need to beware, though: one of the changes in edge Rails depends on a ruby-core patch that hasn’t yet been applied there. You’ll also (temporarily) need to pick up Jeremy Kemper’s fork of Mocha for MiniTest compatability as required by this commit .

Faster boot time in development mode with lazy loading/autoload

Jeremy Kemper and Josh Peek have been doing a ton of work on making sure that bits of Rails (and its dependencies) are only brought into memory when they’re actually needed. Check out the commits from November 23 for a bunch of lazy-loading changes. The core frameworks – Active Support, Active Record, Action Controller, Action Mailer and Action View – are now using autoload to lazy-load their individual classes. This work should help keep the memory footprint down and improve overall Rails performance. commit commit commit commit commit

Misc

You can specify using the new preload_frameworks option whether the core libraries should be autoloaded at startup. This defaults to false so that Rails autoloads itself piece-by-piece, but there are some circumstances where you still need to bring in everything at once – Passenger and JRuby both want to see all of Rails loaded together. commit

Asset hosts get more flexible in edge Rails with the ability to declare an asset host as a specific object that responds to a call. DHH has supplied a sample project, asset-hosting-with-minimum-ssl , that demonstrates one good use for this functionality. commit

You can now configure the location of the helpers folder for a Rails application by setting ActionController::Base.helpers_dir. This will be a boon in some unusual circumstances – the original use case is for building a Rails application that encourages extension via plugin rather than by altering the application itself. commit

Token generation for CSRF protection has been simplified; now Rails uses a simple random string generated by ActiveSupport::SecureRandom rather than mucking around with session IDs. As a result, the :digest and :secret options to protect_from_forgery are deprecated and have no effect on edge. commit

While we’re on the subject of secrets, some people will find novel uses for ActiveSupport::MessageEncryptor, which provides a simple way to encrypt information for storage in an untrusted location (like cookies). commit

Active Support’s from_xml no longer depends on XmlSimple. Instead, Rails now includes its own XmlMini implementation, with just the functionality that it requires. This lets Rails dispense with the bundled copy of XmlSimple that it’s been carting around. commit commit

As you probably recall, last week’s improvements included the renaming of application.rb to application_controller.rb. This week there’s a new rake task, rake rails:update:application_controller to do this automatically for you – and it will be run as part of the normal rake rails:update process. commit

Good news if you’re using ActiveSupport::OrderedHash: it now implements each_key and each_value. commit

One more bit of core Rails is open to I18n: the units used by number_to_human_size. If you’re maintaining a translation file, you need to add the storage_units: [Bytes, KB, MB, GB, TB] to your translations. commit

Support for Rails components – which were famously called “a shining example of what happens when eagerness overtakes prudence” in Agile Web Development With Rails – is finally gone. If a couple of years of warning about this deprecation wasn’t enough for you, then it’s time to find an alternate solution at last. commit

Various files in /public that deal with CGI and FCGI dispatching are no longer generated in every Rails application by default (you can still get them if you need them by adding --with-dispatches when you run the rails command, or add them later with rake rails:generate_dispatchers). commit commit

Just a reminder: I’m not providing pointers to every single commit here, just trying to highlight things. This week’s edge changes actually included 136 commits from a wide variety of contributors.

Posted in Edge |  8 comments

New 15-minute blog video on Rails 2.2

Posted by David November 27, 2008 @ 11:06 AM

The old 15-minute blog video was getting really long in the tooth, so it’s with great pleasure that I can present the new video made with Rails 2.2 and done by Ryan Bates. It really takes it all up a notch by showing the creation of a blog with comments, ajax, feed, api, admin interface, and more.

Ryan Bates is also the author of the wonderful Railscasts.com site that features video explanations on Rails features. It’s a fantastic resource and now properly recognized on the screencasting page.

I’ve also linked up the commercial Rails screencasters. The amount of material available for people interested in learning by video is simply staggering.

Posted in Documentation |  31 comments

Rails 2.2: i18n, HTTP validators, thread safety, JRuby/1.9 compatibility, docs

Posted by David November 21, 2008 @ 05:22 PM

Rails 2.2 is finally done after we cleared the last issues from the release candidate program. This release contains an long list of fixes, improvements, and additions that’ll make everything Rails smoother and better, but we also have a number of star player features to parade this time.

Internationalization by default
The most important is that Rails now includes a full-on internationalization framework and that it’s pre-wired from start. The work of the i18n group has been very impressive and it’s great to see that Rails finally ships with a solution in the box that’s both simple and extensible. Great job, guys!

Stronger etag and last-modified support
We’ve also added much better support for HTTP validators in the form of etag and last-modified. Making it so much easier to skip expensive procesesing if the client already has the latest stuff. This also makes it even easier to use Rails with gateway proxies.

Thread safety and a connection pool
Josh Peek has added thread safety to Rails and Nick Sieger from JRuby worked on getting Active Record a proper connection pool. So now all elements of Rails are thread safe, which is a big boon for the JRuby guys in particular. For C Ruby, we still need a bunch of dependent libraries to go non-blocking before it’ll make much of a difference, but work on that is forth coming.

Ruby 1.9 and JRuby compatibility
Jeremy Kemper has been rocking on both Ruby 1.9 and JRuby compatibility. Rails 2.2 is fully compatible with both, but again, there might be supporting libraries and gems that are not. Again, lots of work is going into making everything else fully compatible as well.

Better API docs, great guides
Finally, the last big push has been with the documentation of Rails. Pratik’s docrails project has made immense progress. Not only are the API docs much improved, but we also have a whole new guides section generated from documentation that now lives with the source. A true community project with lots of contributors. I’m sure both those new and old to Rails will greatly appreciate the strong focus on documentation.

To read about all these features and more in details, checkout the Rails 2.2 release notes—another one of those guides from the docrails project.

How to install
As always, you can install Rails 2.2 through RubyGems. We now require RubyGems 1.3.1, so be sure to update that first: gem update --system

Then you can install Rails: gem install rails

If you’re updating an existing application, you can run rake rails:update to get the latest JavaScript files and scripts.

From all of us to all of you, we hope you enjoy this release. It’s a true pleasure to see Rails make such big steps forward once again. Dig in, have fun, and we’ll be back with Rails 2.3 with even more before you know it.

Posted in Releases |  95 comments

This Week in Edge Rails

Posted by Mike Gunderloy November 21, 2008 @ 03:19 PM

First up this week, a warning for those who don’t closely follow the state of the Rails repository – “edge” really means edge now. The bits for 2.2 are getting locked down for release, and the repository has been forked; for the moment, edge Rails is being identified as 2.3 , though that projected version number might change later. If you’re trying to install almost-released 2.2 bits on your machine, make sure you’re using the 2-2-stable branch, and not edge, which is currently seeing some major changes.

The 2-2-stable code is still seeing changes, but they’re either bug fixes or very small things. This week, that includes fixing a bug in assignment to has_one :through associations , some further tuning of CSRF protection , a fix to handling of checkboxes for Boolean attributes , updating the bundled copies of TZInfo, Prototype, and script.aculo.us, and some Ruby 1.9 compatibility work (though currently full Ruby 1.9 compatibility is targeted for Rails 2.3).

The biggest feature change in the 2.2 branch is the addition of explicit I18n support to newly-generated Rails projects, including a sample locale file, auto-loading all locales in config/locales, and sample settings in config/environment.rb. commit

Also worth noting in 2.2 is a chunk of code removal: a whole mess of special case tests for the SQL Server adapter have been chopped out of the Active Record test cases. That’s because Ken Collins has done tremendous work in making the SQL Server adapter work the way that Rails expects data adapters to work, giving us a big step in the area of backend portability. commit

On the actual edge code (the master branch in the repository), there’s a lot more action. With that branch just opened, some pent-up code has been checked in, and some big changes are being made. It’s an exciting time, and edge is definitely worth checking out. Here are some of the most notable changes in the past week.

One big set of changes has come from Jeremy Kemper, who has been overhauling the internal Rails testing to switch from Test::Unit::TestCase to ActiveSupport::TestCase. This work also includes requiring Mocha to test Rails (in the 2.2 code, some tests are skipped if you don’t have Mocha installed) and generally making the Rails testing strategy (both within core and for generated applications) more consistent moving forward.

If you’re one of the people who has always been bothered by the special-case naming of application.rb, rejoice! It’s been reworked to be application_controller.rb in the edge code. More info here and here . commit

Rails 2.3 will introduce the notion of default scopes : similar to named scopes, but applying to all named scopes or find methods within the class. For example, you can write default_scope :order => 'name ASC' and any time you retrieve records from that class they’ll come out sorted by name (unless you override the option, of course). commit

A lot of folks have adopted the notion of using try() to attempt operations on objects – Here’s Chris Wanstrath’s blog post introducing it. It’s especially helpful in views where you can avoid nil-checking by writing code like <%= @person.try(:name) %>. Well, now it’s baked right into Rails. commit

Also new on the syntactic sugar front is Enumerable#none? to check that none of the elements match the supplied block. commit

The render method has been getting smarter over the years, and it’s going to be even smarter in 2.3. If you have an object or a collection and the naming matches up, you can now just do <% render @article %> or <% render @articles %> and things will just work. Ryan Daigle has some more examples on this. commit

On a somewhat similar note, render_component goes from “deprecated” to “nonexistent” in 2.3. If you still need it, you can install the plugin . commit

The autolink helper has been refactored to make it a bit less messy and more intuitive. commit commit

There’s a fix to a memory leak connected to thread safety and asset tags, that could bite sites that were referencing a lot of external images. Aaron Batalion contributed the fix, as well as a blog post explaining the issue. commit and commit

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that some controversy has erupted over a change made to the 2.2 code five months ago – the addition of Array#second through Array#tenth as aliases for Array#[1] through Array#[9]. Without taking a stand on the controversy (I’ve done that elsewhere), I’ll just note that the most recent edge checkin as I write this trims this down to only support Array#second through Array#fifth – and uses the savings in overhead to implement Array#forty-two. commit

Posted in Edge |  0 comments

Potential Circumvention of CSRF Protection in Rails 2.1

Posted by michael November 18, 2008 @ 06:13 PM

There is a bug in all 2.1.x versions of Ruby on Rails which affects the effectiveness of the CSRF protection given by protect_from_forgery.

By design rails does not perform token verification on requests with certain content types not typically generated by browsers. Unfortunately this list also included ‘text/plain’ which can be generated by browsers.

Impact

Requests can be crafted which will circumvent the CSRF protection entirely. Rails does not parse the parameters provided with these requests, but that may not be enough to protect your application.

Affected Versions

• All releases in the 2.1 series
• All 2.2 Pre Releases

Fixes

The upcoming 2.1.3 and 2.2.2 releases will contain a fix for this issue.

Interim Workarounds

Users of 2.1.x releases are advised to insert the following code into a file in config/initializers/

Mime::Type.unverifiable_types.delete(:text)

Users of Edge Rails after 2.2.1, should upgrade to the latest code in 2-2-stable.

The patch for the 2.1.x series is available on github. This will also apply cleanly to 2.2 pre-releases prior to this changeset released on Thursday November 13th at 11:19:53 2008 CET. Users with edge-rails checkouts after that date, are advised to upgrade to the latest code in 2-2-stable.

Thanks to Steve from Coderrr for reporting this issue.

9 comments

New Rails 2.2 i18n defaults

Posted by David November 18, 2008 @ 01:44 PM

I just reduced the housework needed to setup a new Rails application with i18n. All new applications will ship with a config/locales directory that’s automatically wired up in the load path for i18n. So you can just drop .yml or .rb locale files in there and they’ll be instantly available for translation.

There’s also a sample config/locales/en.yml file in there to give you a starting point. In addition, the initializer is now wired up through the Rails config. The new default environment.rb provides these pointers:

# The internationalization framework can be changed 
# to have another default locale (standard is :en) or more load paths.
# All files from config/locales/*.rb,yml are added automatically.
# config.i18n.load_path << Dir[File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'my', 'locales', '*.{rb,yml}')]
# config.i18n.default_locale = :de

So on a fresh Rails 2.2 application, you’ll be able to do see it all wired up out of the box (the :hello key is from the config/locales/en.yml demo file):

$ ./script/console
>> I18n.t :hello
=> "Hello world"

Rails 2.2 final is just around the corner. We’ve been ironing out the last bugs and added the last amount of polish to make this a kick ass release. Also, work on 2.3 / 3.0 has already begun in master as well since we’ve branched for 2.2 a while back.

Posted in Documentation |  36 comments

Rails 2.2 RC2: Last stop before final

Posted by David November 14, 2008 @ 03:55 PM

Rails 2.2 has been baking for long enough now. This is the last taste before the goodies are served. So please install and check it out. See if you can find any regressions or bugs in any of the new stuff, so we can have it all delicious by the time we ring the dinner bell (ok, ok, I’ll put down the food metaphor now).

This release also conciedes with the fact that we’ve branches 2-2-stable, which means that master is now actually targeting Rails 2.3/3.0. There’s also a tag available for this RC as v2.2.1.

If you missed RC1, have a look at the Rails 2.2 release notes to see the major additions. You can see what’s new since RC1 in these two This Week in Edge Rails.

To install, you must first have RubyGems 1.3.1:
gem update --system.

Then you can:
gem install rails -s http://gems.rubyonrails.org

Enjoy!

Posted in Releases |  33 comments

This Week in Edge Rails

Posted by Mike Gunderloy November 14, 2008 @ 03:29 PM

The important news in edge Rails this week is the imminent release of Rails 2.2.1 – otherwise known as Rails 2.2 RC2. Getting ready for this release did lead to some significant changes in the Rails codebase.

First, it’s very likely that you’ll need to upgrade rubygems to run RC2: the required version of rubygems is now 1.3.1, which was just released yesterday. This dependency is part of the continued work to make vendored gems useful and stable. You may find that updating rubygems is less than smooth, depending on your current version; check out this article if you have any trouble. commit

The Rails routing engine has seen some serious work over the past week as well. For starters, Jeremy Kemper committed several fixes to the core routing engine that cut down on object creation and RegExp creation, trimming memory use. commit commit There are also new :only and :except options for map.resources, which can help cut down memory use if you have a lot of resource routes – see these articles for details (though there have been some tweaks in the way nested limited routes work after those were written). commit commit commit

The new ActiveRecord connection pooling code has seen some tuning as well, making it more efficient in development model and avoiding some issues with the Oracle adapter. commit

Polymorphic URLs now behave more intuitively if one of their parameters is nil. For example, a call to polymorphic_path([@project, @filter, @issue]) with a nil filter now returns project_issue_url instead of a NoMethodError. commit

The request forgery protection feature in Rails has been tightened up so that it only applies to HTML-formatted content requests. There is substantial discussion on the Lighthouse ticket that led to this change, but the bottom line is that the old implementation had some bugs, notably making destroy actions inaccessible via XML. Other types of requests are protected by other means – for instance, the same origin policy on AJAX requests substitutes for request forgery protection there. commit

Posted in Edge |  2 comments

Official DB2 adapter from IBM for Rails

Posted by David November 09, 2008 @ 05:49 PM

IBM have just wrapped up a new DB2 adapter that fixes a bunch of bugs, adds support for a range of features, and works with the rails -d setup to create a new Rails application straight for DB2. Check it out: A major milestone for DB2 on Rails.

Posted in Sightings |  3 comments

This Week in Edge Rails

Posted by Mike Gunderloy November 07, 2008 @ 01:22 PM

Rails, as you probably know, is under active development. So, for those of you who don’t have time to read every commit to the source, we’ve decided to revive this section of the weblog. This time around, I’m covering 3 weeks of commits: the time since Rails 2.2 RC1 (otherwise known as Rails 2.2.0) was released. Though there aren’t any major new features being added as Rails drives towards the 2.2 release, that doesn’t mean the source has been completely quiet: there have been about 75 commits in that three-week period. Here’s a look at some of those changes.

In the run-up to 2.2, we’re seeing a batch of little bug fixes, as people try to ensure quality in the release. These include:

• Squashing a binary data corruption bug that surfaced in the PostgreSQL adapter. commit
• The regex behind redirect_to can now accept a wider variety of URL schemes, making it possible to redirect to some destinations that were previously inaccessible. commit
• A regression in date_select and datetime_select that could raise a Null Pointer Exception under some circumstances has been fixed. commit
• The sanitize helper has been fixed to avoid double escaping already properly escaped entities. commit
• FormTagHelper has been stopped from generating illegal HTML if the name contains square brackets. commit
• A memory leak was squashed in Active Record scoped methods. commit

Some of the major features for 2.2 have been getting fine-tuned as well. There’s been work to clean up some loose ends in the thread safety department, and changes to make the I18n backend reload its translations in development mode. The included Prototype bits were bumped to the latest 1.6.0.3 release. The code for configuring, loading, and vendoring gems has had some attention, and the code for maintaining database connection pools has come in for some fine-tuning as well.

Just because we’re in feature freeze doesn’t mean that a few new features can’t sneak in:

• The current_page method is a bit more reliable now in that it ignores options you don’t explicitly supply (making it more friendly to URLs that use the query string for pagination and the like). commit
• The default logging has been cleaned up to be less chatty: you’ll see fewer duplicate log messages as Rails goes about its business. commit
• The render method now takes a :js option to allow you to directly render inline JavaScript without using RJS. commit
• If you’ve got a current (Ruby 1.8.7 or greater) version of Ruby, Action Mailer turns on STARTTLS if the server supports it; this makes Action Mailer compatible with GMail without the need for plugins. commit

One final note: I’m deliberately not trying to cover every single commit here; just those ones that struck me as most interesting. But if I left out something that you think is highly significant, feel free to add a pointer in the comments!

Posted in Edge |  17 comments

Rails Guides Wants You

Posted by Mike Gunderloy November 03, 2008 @ 07:30 PM

If you haven’t looked at the state of Rails documentation lately, it’s time to look again. The new Ruby on Rails Guides page includes 14 separate guides for Rails developers, with topics ranging from “Getting Started” to routing, security, testing, and debugging. That’s over 70,000 words of help content for Rails users that didn’t exist two months ago when we launched the Rails Guides project.

But we’re not done yet! We’re starting phase 2 of the Guides project, and planning a fresh batch of content to add to what’s already there. Our goal is to have a single page where you can find all of the information you need to be an effective Rails developer. Remember, though: this is open source. That means we want your help too!

Here’s what you can do to get involved:

• Read about the process of and rewards for contributing on the Hackfest page.
• Check the list of available tickets in our Lighthouse project, and sign up to write a guide.
• Submit corrections, suggestion, bugs, or patches for the existing guides. You’ll find a link to the relevant Lighthouse ticket at the bottom of each guide.
• Let us know what other guides you think should be added – whether you want to write them, or just hope that someone else will. Just leave a note in the comments here and we’ll get your idea into the process.

You’ll usually find some of the documentation team hanging around in #docrails on IRC. Come join us and help the community!

Posted in Documentation |  17 comments

3 Weeks in Rails (October 29, 2008)

Posted by Gregg Pollack October 29, 2008 @ 09:16 PM

It’s been 3 weeks (I know I’ve been slacking). However, it’s time to write out another summary of information that any Rails developer might want to know about. Detailed audio versions of these notes can be found on the Rails Envy Podcast #51, #52, and #53.

You may already be aware that Rails 2.2 RC1 was released last Friday. For a glimpse at the new features you can read through the Release Notes. However, if you’re looking for something more comprehensive check out the Envycast on Ruby on Rails 2.2^ or the What’s New PDF by Carlos Brando.

Rails 2.0.5 and Rails 2.1.2 were also pushed in the last few weeks, mostly just plugging up a few small security concerns. If you’re on 2.x, you should probably take the time to upgrade.

If you’re taking advantage of the localization features of Rails 2.2, there are two libraries you should probably be aware of. First, Diego Carrion recently created a fork of restful_authentication where he added full support for i18n. Secondly, Karel Minarik recently released a plugin for doing localized_country_select so you can display countries the appropriate language.

If you need your Rails application to receive emails, one way to do it is to use gmail IMAP. John Nunemaker wrote up a nice walkthrough showing all the scripts need to parse email out of gmail.

Hosting, Performance, and Tuning

With Rails 2.2 thread safety, you might assume that brings a performance boost for everyone. However, this is not always the case and Pratik Naik explains why.

Ilya Grigorik wrote a blog post about Scaling Rails with MYSQL Plus where he uses the Non-Blocking MySQL driver from Neverblock to get some increased performance out of ActiveRecord which is quite impressive.

If you need to implement full text search in your Rails application, and you are already thinking Sphinx, you may want to check out the Thinking Sphinx PDF by Pat Allan over on Peepcode.

Library News

If you’re a fan of resource_controller (skinny REST controllers) and Shoulda you shoulda definitely check out the starter app by James Golick called Blank.

The next time you need to build a “Software As A Service” website (like basecamp), check out Service Merchant. This gem sits on top of Active Merchant and gives you everything you need to do Subscription Billing.

Do you ever forget your Rails routes? There’s always the “rake routes” command, but that’s not very user friendly. You might want to check out Vasco. Vasco is a Route explorer for Rails which provides a nice web interface to browse through and test all your Rails routes.

If you ever need to build a Rails application which is accessible on multiple domains or multiple paths (like foo.com or bar.com or a.com/foo) then take a look at the Rails Proxy Plugin by Sean Huber. This plugin allows you to dynamically respond to proxied requests by detecting the incoming path and properly setting the session domain, default host, and relative url root.

If you need an easy way to test your plugin which extends ActiveRecord, check out acts_as_fu, which aside from it’s unfortunate name, is pretty slick.

If you came over from PHP, you’re probably familiar with phpMyAdmin. One of the Rails Rumble teams made a Ruby version of phpMyAdmin that’s definitely worth checking out if you’re missing a quick web interface to your db.

Event News

The Rails Rumble is over and you only have 3 more days to vote (voting closes on Midnight November 1st). Cast your vote! It’s good practice for next Tuesday (least in the US).

If you’re over in London, Ruby Manor is taking place November 22nd. Looks like it’s going to be a fun unconference type of event.

Lastly, Rubyconf is next week here in Orlando, Florida where it’s been kinda chilly lately. Definitely pack something warm just in case, and see you next week!

Image Credit: Blue Sky on Rails by ecstaticist, Analog Solutions 606 Mod by Formication, RailsConf Europe 2006 by Paul Watson, Rainbow by One Good Bumblebee
^ In the interest of full disclosure, I do produce Envycasts, and profit from the sale of the screencasts.

Posted in General |  37 comments

Step by step guide to contributing code to Rails

Posted by David October 27, 2008 @ 07:21 PM

Always wanted to bask in the glory of being a Rails contributor? Mike Gunderloy has compiled a 12-step program to get you there from square. It’s never to late to get started. According to some calculations, we’ve already had some 1,400 different people contribute.

Posted in Documentation |  2 comments

Rails 2.2 RC1: i18n, thread safety, docs, etag/last-modified, JRuby/1.9 compatibility

Posted by David October 24, 2008 @ 12:47 PM

Rails 2.2 is almost ready for its final release, but before we christen the gems, we’d like to have everyone test out a release candidate. Rails 2.2 is a major upgrade that includes a wealth of new features and fixes.

Chief inclusions are an internationalization framework, thread safety (including a connection pool for Active Record), easier access to HTTP caching with etags and last modified, compatibility with Ruby 1.9 and JRuby, and a wealth of new documentation.

Mike Gunderloy has compiled an exhaustive list and walk-through of many of the interesting new features for the Rails 2.2 release notes.

To help test the Rails 2.2 release candidate, please install with:
gem install rails -s http://gems.rubyonrails.org -v 2.2.0

Hopefully there will not be too much folly in the RC and we can quickly move to a final release. But it requires your help to get there.

Note that this release is called 2.2.0, not 2.1.99 as our previous naming scheme would have dictated. So the final release of Rails 2.2 will actually be 2.2.1 (if we only need one RC).

Posted in Releases |  50 comments

Rails 2.1.2: Security, other fixes

Posted by David October 23, 2008 @ 06:21 PM

Rails 2.1.2 includes the same two security fixes that we pushed out for 2.0.x recently. We’re talking about a backport of the offset/limit sanitization fix for Active Record and a fix against header-injection when using user-contributed strings in redirect_to (see Response Splitting for more information).

In addition, Rails 2.1.2 fixes the warning that users of RubyGems 1.3.0 were having with script/generate as well as a range of other minor fixes. Enjoy!

As always, you can install with:
gem install rails --version 2.1.2

Posted in Releases |  23 comments