Rails 3.0 Beta Release | Hacker News Reader

Rails 3.0 Beta Release

weblog.rubyonrails.org

109 pointsmrduncan37 comments

I think I like the Unobtrusive JavaScript helpers the most out of the new features. This will really help cleanup our pages and make it easy to switch libraries. Also everything has just generally been fixed/rewritten, kind of like Snow Leopard. Another exciting addition is arel, because out of anything in Rails, I think the associations needed the most work.

IMHO, ActiveRecord sucked the most ... form validations coupled to models, no lazy queries ... and after working with Django's models and Perl's DBIx::Class it was my biggest pain when trying Rails.

Anyway, great job ... Rails 3 seems awesome :)

I agree with everything. We've been having to use a ton of hacks to make Rails work the way we want it to. I'm going to be ecstatic when I can use all of this goodness in production... Many thanks to everyone that made this release possible!

There's so much goodness in this release it's hard to digest in one setting. They've fixed just about everything I've found frustrating, added some really brilliant new work and elegantly set the framework up for expansion.

A long list of just some of the new goodness is listed here:

http://guides.rails.info/3_0_release_notes.html

Does anyone know what exactly is meant by the claim that the new Active Record is, "built on top of relational algebra", particularly in light of the fact that not even RDBMS are strictly relational algebra?

See http://github.com/rails/arel for examples of it.

Interesting, thanks.

Also a blog post from the author about Arel here:

http://magicscalingsprinkles.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/why-i-...

Pratik Naik does a pretty good round up of the new AR here http://m.onkey.org/2010/1/22/active-record-query-interface

The improved email and routing are huge! Not to mention bundler for gems, I can't help but be a bit excited :-)

Question ... is there documentation / tutorials written for Rails 3?

These guides are being updated for Rails 3:

http://guides.rails.info/getting_started.html

Why the down-vote?

RDocs should still work if you generate them.

Anyone tried it out? How's the memory usage compare to older releases?

I have. Less memory usage than before on my apps, but ymmv.

I tried it out, but it doesn't seem to be working with Mongrel/thin yet (the most popular web application servers) so I haven't been able to get a good picture yet.

Really? The beta is supposed to be super Rack compatible, so that's surprising... maybe you should file a bug.

Yeah. They don't even start with rails 3 installed with an error of missing required files. I even tried reinstalling mongrel/thin. No luck. Why was that original post voted down?

Odd. I have no idea why anything in this thread was vote down.

Very well done. Rails has just leaped forward ahaed of all the web frameworks out there.

Once all the back-slapping and hyperbole has died down, I'd be interested to see a comparison

What can Django take from this as inspiration?

At the very least the unobtrusive javascript helpers. It's easy to imagine that all web frameworks will come to a kind of protocol modeled on the efforts of the rails core team here. This will mean that you can use any JS framework ( Prototype, jQuery, Moo, Google Closure, Ext ) and simply add a few lines of shim code that correctly reworks the tags to their AJAX equivalents when it encounters the correct data- tags. It's a brilliant abstraction.

Django will get JavaScript "helpers" over my dead body.

Why the hate? Honest question, as I know next to nothing about Django.

I've been arguing about this for years; my view is that people should actually learn and write JavaScript rather than demand the framework write it for them automatically. Refusing to learn a key technology of the web platform isn't an attitude I'd like to encourage.

Some samples of my reasoning and the times I've argued it with people:

http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2006/jul/02/django-and-ajax/

http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2006/jul/04/javascript-orm-and-...

http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2006/jul/17/helpers-scaffolding...

Yes you have a point. But otoh, the history of software has been one of more and more abstraction and code generation. This argument can be made (not saying you are making it) to say something like "People should actually learn and use Assembler than demand that their C compiler do it for them. Refusing to learn a key technology of Computing is not something that I'd like to encourage".

Many languages generate C code. Should everyone learn C because it is a foundational language? (and it is a foundational language). Do you insist all Django users learn C? Why not?

It is ok to have a choice of learning Javascript or not. Just like people have the choice to learn Assembler or have it generated for them. To learn C or have it generated for them.

And framework devs have the freedom to choose whether their framework supports javascript code generation or not. There aren't really any good or evil choices. Rails is cool. Django is, too (I prefer Django fwiw).

Gotcha. That's a pretty reasonable position to take.

Personally, I've written my own "let's see if xmlhttprequest exists, otherwise, do the thing ie needs" ajax handlers, I've written a bunch of SQL, and all that other fun foundational stuff. So I'm really glad that I can just not worry about that and use what's already written, because it's pretty much what I would write anyway. And my snarky reply to 'stfu, write your own' is "Why aren't you coding in machine code, then? Your compiler/interpreter is just hand holding!"

But if I didn't already know it, it'd be easy to cripple myself by never bothering to learn.

(Also, I've been writing my own javascript, even within rails, because I prefer jQuery to prototype.)

Fair enough. It doesn't have to be helpers. It could become the standard way of writing active ajax elements. Typing out <a href="/stuff" data-remote="true">more</a> is pretty efficient even by hand.

Great news ! My thanks go out to all the people who contributed to this release.

Big thanks Rail3 team. This is a truly worthy next iteration. Can't wait to tinker with it this weekend.

HTML5 doctype—nice :)

Not just that, all helpers now spit out html5, and things like unobtrusive javascript use some of html5's more interesting features.

Great job, guys :)

For real this time.

Python or Ruby.. that is the question.

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