Rails 3.0 Released

Last week, after an extended beta-testing period, the Ruby on Rails team finally released Rails 3.0. Earlier this year, I blogged about a few of the coolest new features in Rails 3: a new package dependency manager called Bundler, a reworking of the ActiveRecord query syntax, and a brand-new routing system.

There’s a lot more to Rails 3 than that, though. The new version uncouples all the components of Rails, so that they can easily be swapped out for your preferred alternatives; for instance, you can easily use jQuery instead of the default Prototype for your JavaScript, or datamapper instead of ActiveRecord for your ORM. Rails 3 also leverages Ruby 1.9’s Unicode magic to do away with character encoding issues, and includes built-in XSS protection. ActiveMailer, Rails’s email component, has been rewritten and is now much easier to use.

Have a look at the official announcement on the Rails blog, and check out a series of screencasts released under the rubric Dive into Rails 3 for even more details.

Itching to get started? As always, update or install with gem install rails, or check out the download page for full installation instructions.