Rails 2.1 release candidate 1 is on its way

Word out on the wire is that Rails 2.1 RC1 has been tagged in the repository, so the gems should be available shortly. Being a point release, the changes aren’t major - mainly bug fixes and some performance improvements, but there are still some new features that will make it worth a look.

Updated timezone support

Timezones will finally become a first class citizen in Rails. You will be able to set the timezone, and all subsequent time calls will be with in that zone.


Time.zone = "Australia/Perth"
Time.zone.now # will return something like Wed, 24 May 2008 22:56:00 WST +08:00

Better Gem dependencies

If you rely on gems in any of your projects (and why wouldn’t you? Code re-use and all that), you may have come across the pain of gem versioning. Rails 2.1 will allow you to stipulate what versions of each gem you need.


config.gem "chronic", :version => '0.2.3'

It also adds a rake task that will automatically install the right gems for you.


rake gems:unpack

Improved caching

Previously, the only caching options Rails developers had was based around file fragments, which is fine for single server setups - but scaling that up to multiple servers could cause synchronisation issues, causing your cache to go stale. To combat this, you can now use a number of other shared caching systems including a memory store, drb store and a mem-cache store.

All very exciting stuff, and well worth a checking out. If you can download the beta gems by running the following from your trusty terminal window:


gem install rails –source http://gems.rubyonrails.com/

Share and Enjoy:

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 1:19 am, contains 255 words, 6 images, and is filed under Ruby on Rails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. The views and opinions in this blog post are those of its author.

This post has 2 responses so far

Ealameda Says:
May 15th, 2008 at 4:58 am

Actually Rails has had the options of using memory, drb or memcached to store fragment caches for quite a long time now.

I know it’s been in there since at least v1.2
jonic Says:
May 16th, 2008 at 2:50 am

Thanks for that… I’m just getting into Rails, and it’s reassuring to see that it’s in such active development… 2.1RC1 just five months after 2.0? Nice :)

Just one thing… You need a double hyphen before “source” (and it can’t hurt to stick a ’sudo’ in there too just in case):
sudo gem install rails --source http://gems.rubyonrails.com/
Ignore the ’sudo’ if you’re on Windows, and also be wary of copying/pasting that, the hyphen was converted to a “û” when I tried it…

Thanks again :)

Your Blogmaster is...

Myles Eftos

Myles Eftos is a Perth-based web developer that jumped on the Rails express and never looked back. He is the event co-ordinator for the Australian Web Industry Assocation which explains why most of their events are at the pub near his house.