Is Ruby on Rails 3 Finally Nearing the Finish Line?

June 17, 2010

At the end of 2008, the open source Ruby on Rails and Merb Ruby frameworks merged together in an effort to unify development of Ruby on Rails 3. Fast forward 18 months and Ruby on Rails 3 (RoR) has yet to be officially released, though a release candidate is set for this week.

With the RoR 3 release, the open source development framework is being overhauled to provide more modularity and greater power compared to the current RoR 2 framework.

"We just spent a year and a half refactoring the whole thing, so there is a huge amount of internal improvement which mostly manifests itself as improvements in plugins," Yehuda Katz, a member of the Ruby on Rails core team and Rails framework architect at Engine Yard, told InternetNews.com.

Katz added that the framework overall was improved, with better dependency management and API improvements. Katz explained that the first year of the Rails 3 effort was largely consumed with refactoring the Rails codebase.

"When I say refactoring, what I mean is the traditional definition, which is making changes to the code without changing the functionality," Katz said. "We've made huge changes to the Rails internals without changing for the most part, how users are expecting to use the framework."

Katz noted that Rails has always been flexible, allowing developers to do whatever they want. With Rails 3, Katz said that the core development team looked at the whole ecosystem to see what people were really doing. The next step was then to expose better, more explicit and supportable ways to do those things that everyone is doing. ...

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Source: devx.com