Rails 3 has landed! 9 Sep 10
After two years of hard work, the third generation of Rails is ready for the big time! Rails 3 brings about some major changes to make things all together “better, faster, cleaner, and more beautiful” and solve some of the common issues seen with Rails 2. Some of the major highlights include
Improved router syntax for Action Controller
The router syntax in Rails 3 has been completely revamped to build on the work from Rails 2 and provide a more elegant and flexible way to provide completely RESTful access for controllers. To get started see the new routing guide.
Brand new Action Mailer
Action Mailer was previously a bit of a hybrid, part controller, part model. Rails 3 sees Action Mailer completely rewritten purely as a controller, it now behaves much more like Action Controller. The new Action Mailer guide describes how to get going.
New query engine for Active Record
Active Record has adopted a new query engine to make complex queries more consistent and manageable. Execution of queries is now delayed until actually required and not when defined. For an introduction to the new query engine check out the new new Active Record guide.
Bundler
Traditionally, managing the dependencies for your Rails app deployment can be a bit of a nightmare. While Capistrano, Rake and other partial solutions make automating things easier, they’re often not elegant or simple. Bundler provides a complete solution to managing gems, libraries, frameworks and plugins that your app depends on. The latest release of the Brightbox deployment gem offers full support for Bundler.
Other improvements include built in XSS protection, an official plugins API, Agnosticism with plugins, Active Model callbacks & validations, better handling of character encoding and many more. For a more comprehensive list of changes see the release notes.
Rails 3 on your Brightboxes
Getting up and running with Rails 3 on your Brightboxes should be as simple as you’re used to with your existing Rails 2 apps.