Ruby on Rails Project Announces Ruby on Rails 3.0 Beta

Ruby on Rails 3.0 beta was recently released by the Ruby on Rails Project, and this release includes Merb integration. Merb is an model-view-controller (MVC) framework that prefers plugins over core libraries, making it faster, easier to understand, maintain and extend.

Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson blogged about the release, stating that “You thought we were never going to get to this day, didn’t you? Ye of little faith. Because here is the first real, public release of Rails 3.0 in the form of a beta package that we’ve toiled long and hard over.” Hansson noted that the release is a beta, and is “surely not perfect yet.”

This release focuses on the unification of the Merb concept with the core Ruby on Rails technology. Merb was written in Ruby, and Rails 3 includes the best features of both. Yehuda Katz, one of the founders of the original Merb team, commented in his blog, stating “One of the things that most surprised and impressed me is the Rails core team’s (and especially DHH’s) attention to detail and the experience of the beta release. For weeks, we’ve been ‘this close’ to releasing, but the experience of starting up a new Rails app or upgrading from a Rails 2.3 app still felt too unpleasant. In this kind of situation, it’s tempting to say ‘it’s just a beta—people who use beta software know what they’re getting,’ but that would have been a major cop-out. For many people on the leading edge, a poor beta experience will shape their perception of the product as a whole. So we waited a bit, but now we’re finally here.”

Release notes from the Rails 3 beta release notes continued to praise the integration, stating “There are all the good ideas brought over from when the Merb team joined the party and brought a focus on framework agnosticism, slimmer and faster internals, and a handful of tasty APIs. If you’re coming to Rails 3.0 from Merb 1.x, you should recognize lots. If you’re coming from Rails 2.x, you’re going to love it too.”

The Release notes reiterated “we’ve tried our best to deprecate the old APIs with nice warnings. That means that you can move your existing application to Rails 3 without immediately rewriting all your old code to the latest best practices.”