Rails 3 beta by February

According to David Heinemeier Hansson, the founder of the Ruby based web development framework, although a beta of Rails 3 is expected by the end of this month the release may slip into February. Hansson gave the estimated release timing in an article on InfoWorld. If all goes to plan Rails 3 is expected to arrive in the first quarter of this year. Rails 3 is a major reworking of the framework which sees ideas from the alternative Merb framework being integrated in a development process which began in December 2008.

The new version of Rails will incorporate Merb features such as improved performance, support for jQuery and a simpler routing API for better REST support. Inspired by Merb, Rails 3 will also incorporate an API to make plug-ins easier to add and manage and become "test framework agnostic" to support rSpec as well as traditional unit tests.

Rails 3 is not just about Merb features; a mechanism to protect against cross site scripting attacks, easier complex queries in ActiveRecord, ActiveModels to abstract functionality from ActiveRecord to help support non-SQL back ends and a new way of packaging Rails applications, will all feature in Rails 3.

(djwm)