Rails 3.0 approaches with RC2

The Ruby on Rails developers have announced the second and final release candidate for version 3.0 of their open source web framework. According to Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson, the RC2 release contains "very few changes over the first" and will allow for thorough testing before the upcoming major release with its new dependencies.

The developer ask that Rails 3.0 RC2 users help to put the development preview through its paces before the final release, especially noting the two new main dependencies: Bundler and ARel. Rails 3.0 now has its own stable branch; the master branch has been reserved for development of version 3.1 of Rails.

Assuming that no other blockers or regressions are discovered, RC2 will be the last release candidate and the final release of Rails 3.0 should arrive "this week". As with all development releases, use of RC2 in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised.

Rails 3 is a major revision of Rails, bringing together the Rails and Merb frameworks to create a slimmer and faster platform for web applications written in Ruby. An early version of the release notes is available which covers the changes in the frameworks architecture.

More details about the release can be found in the official release announcement and in the change log. Rails is available under an MIT licence and can be installed by running gem install rails --pre on a system with Ruby and RubyGems installed. The latest stable release is version 2.3.8 from the 25th of May, 2010.

See also:

• Rails 3 nears with release candidate availability, a report from The H.
• Rails 2.3.8 released to fix 2.3.7's "Facepalm", a report from The H.

(crve)