Rails 2.1 release candidate 1 is on its way

By | May 15, 2008 | Ruby on Rails Tutorials & Articles

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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/

Written By:

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.

 

{ 2 comments }

jonic May 16, 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 :)

Ealameda May 15, 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

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