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/
Myles EftosMyles a Perth-based web developer who has worked in all the major web languages, his weapon of choice being Ruby on Rails—although he’s found himself doing more and more front-end development in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
