123456789_123456789_123456789_123456789_123456789_

Ruby on Rails 3.0 Release Notes

Rails 3.0 is ponies and rainbows! It's going to cook you dinner and fold your laundry. You're going to wonder how life was ever possible before it arrived. It's the Best Version of Rails We've Ever Done!

But seriously now, it's really good stuff. 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.

Even if you don't give a hoot about any of our internal cleanups, Rails 3.0 is going to delight. We have a bunch of new features and improved APIs. It's never been a better time to be a Rails developer. Some of the highlights are:

On top of all that, 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.

These release notes cover the major upgrades, but don't include every little bug fix and change. Rails 3.0 consists of almost 4,000 commits by more than 250 authors! If you want to see everything, check out the list of commits in the main Rails repository on GitHub.


To install Rails 3:

# Use sudo if your setup requires it
$ gem install rails

Upgrading to Rails 3

If you're upgrading an existing application, it's a great idea to have good test coverage before going in. You should also first upgrade to Rails 2.3.5 and make sure your application still runs as expected before attempting to update to Rails 3. Then take heed of the following changes:

Rails 3 requires at least Ruby 1.8.7

Rails 3.0 requires Ruby 1.8.7 or higher. Support for all of the previous Ruby versions has been dropped officially and you should upgrade as early as possible. Rails 3.0 is also compatible with Ruby 1.9.2.

TIP: Note that Ruby 1.8.7 p248 and p249 have marshaling bugs that crash Rails 3.0. Ruby Enterprise Edition have these fixed since release 1.8.7-2010.02 though. On the 1.9 front, Ruby 1.9.1 is not usable because it outright segfaults on Rails 3.0, so if you want to use Rails 3 with 1.9.x jump on 1.9.2 for smooth sailing.

Rails Application object

As part of the groundwork for supporting running multiple Rails applications in the same process, Rails 3 introduces the concept of an Application object. An application object holds all the application specific configurations and is very similar in nature to config/environment.rb from the previous versions of Rails.

Each Rails application now must have a corresponding application object. The application object is defined in config/application.rb. If you're upgrading an existing application to Rails 3, you must add this file and move the appropriate configurations from config/environment.rb to config/application.rb.

script/* replaced by script/rails

The new script/rails replaces all the scripts that used to be in the script directory. You do not run script/rails directly though, the rails command detects it is being invoked in the root of a Rails application and runs the script for you. Intended usage is:

$ rails console                      # instead of script/console
$ rails g scaffold post title:string # instead of script/generate scaffold post title:string

Run rails --help for a list of all the options.

Dependencies and config.gem

The config.gem method is gone and has been replaced by using bundler and a Gemfile, see Vendoring Gems below.

Upgrade Process

To help with the upgrade process, a plugin named Rails Upgrade has been created to automate part of it.

Simply install the plugin, then run rake rails:upgrade:check to check your app for pieces that need to be updated (with links to information on how to update them). It also offers a task to generate a Gemfile based on your current config.gem calls and a task to generate a new routes file from your current one. To get the plugin, simply run the following:

$ ruby script/plugin install git://github.com/rails/rails_upgrade.git

You can see an example of how that works at Rails Upgrade is now an Official Plugin

Aside from Rails Upgrade tool, if you need more help, there are people on IRC and rubyonrails-talk that are probably doing the same thing, possibly hitting the same issues. Be sure to blog your own experiences when upgrading so others can benefit from your knowledge!

Creating a Rails 3.0 application

# You should have the 'rails' RubyGem installed
$ rails new myapp
$ cd myapp

Vendoring Gems

Rails now uses a Gemfile in the application root to determine the gems you require for your application to start. This Gemfile is processed by the , Bundler which then installs all your dependencies. It can even install all the dependencies locally to your application so that it doesn't depend on the system gems.

More information: - bundler homepage

Living on the Edge

Bundler and Gemfile makes freezing your Rails application easy as pie with the new dedicated bundle command, so rake freeze is no longer relevant and has been dropped.

If you want to bundle straight from the Git repository, you can pass the --edge flag:

$ rails new myapp --edge

If you have a local checkout of the Rails repository and want to generate an application using that, you can pass the --dev flag:

$ ruby /path/to/rails/bin/rails new myapp --dev

Rails Architectural Changes

There are six major changes in the architecture of Rails.

Railties Restrung

Railties was updated to provide a consistent plugin API for the entire Rails framework as well as a total rewrite of generators and the Rails bindings, the result is that developers can now hook into any significant stage of the generators and application framework in a consistent, defined manner.

All Rails core components are decoupled

With the merge of Merb and Rails, one of the big jobs was to remove the tight coupling between Rails core components. This has now been achieved, and all Rails core components are now using the same API that you can use for developing plugins. This means any plugin you make, or any core component replacement (like DataMapper or Sequel) can access all the functionality that the Rails core components have access to and extend and enhance at will.

More information: - The Great Decoupling

Active Model Abstraction

Part of decoupling the core components was extracting all ties to Active Record from Action Pack. This has now been completed. All new ORM plugins now just need to implement Active Model interfaces to work seamlessly with Action Pack.

More information: - Make Any Ruby Object Feel Like ActiveRecord

Controller Abstraction

Another big part of decoupling the core components was creating a base superclass that is separated from the notions of HTTP in order to handle rendering of views etc. This creation of AbstractController allowed ActionController and ActionMailer to be greatly simplified with common code removed from all these libraries and put into Abstract Controller.

More Information: - Rails Edge Architecture

Arel Integration

Arel (or Active Relation) has been taken on as the underpinnings of Active Record and is now required for Rails. Arel provides an SQL abstraction that simplifies out Active Record and provides the underpinnings for the relation functionality in Active Record.

More information: - Why I wrote Arel

Mail Extraction

Action Mailer ever since its beginnings has had monkey patches, pre parsers and even delivery and receiver agents, all in addition to having TMail vendored in the source tree. Version 3 changes that with all email message related functionality abstracted out to the Mail gem. This again reduces code duplication and helps create definable boundaries between Action Mailer and the email parser.

More information: - New Action Mailer API in Rails 3

Documentation

The documentation in the Rails tree is being updated with all the API changes, additionally, the Rails Edge Guides are being updated one by one to reflect the changes in Rails 3.0. The guides at guides.rubyonrails.org however will continue to contain only the stable version of Rails (at this point, version 2.3.5, until 3.0 is released).

More Information: - . Rails Documentation Projects

Internationalization

A large amount of work has been done with I18n support in Rails 3, including the latest I18n gem supplying many speed improvements.

More Information: - Rails 3 I18n changes

Railties

With the decoupling of the main Rails frameworks, Railties got a huge overhaul so as to make linking up frameworks, engines or plugins as painless and extensible as possible:

Railties generators got a huge amount of attention in Rails 3.0, basically:

Also, the views generated by Railties generators had some overhaul:

Finally a couple of enhancements were added to the rake tasks:

Railties now deprecates:

PLUGIN/rails/tasks, and PLUGIN/tasks are no longer loaded all tasks now must be in PLUGIN/lib/tasks.

More information:

Action Pack

There have been significant internal and external changes in Action Pack.

Abstract Controller

Abstract Controller pulls out the generic parts of Action Controller into a reusable module that any library can use to render templates, render partials, helpers, translations, logging, any part of the request response cycle. This abstraction allowed ::ActionMailer::Base to now just inherit from AbstractController and just wrap the Rails DSL onto the Mail gem.

It also provided an opportunity to clean up Action Controller, abstracting out what could to simplify the code.

Note however that Abstract Controller is not a user facing API, you will not run into it in your day to day use of Rails.

More Information: - Rails Edge Architecture

Action Controller

Deprecations:

More Information:

Action Dispatch

Action Dispatch is new in Rails 3.0 and provides a new, cleaner implementation for routing.

NOTE. The old style map commands still work as before with a backwards compatibility layer, however this will be removed in the 3.1 release.

Deprecations

More Information:

Action View

Unobtrusive JavaScript

Major re-write was done in the Action View helpers, implementing Unobtrusive JavaScript (UJS) hooks and removing the old inline AJAX commands. This enables Rails to use any compliant UJS driver to implement the UJS hooks in the helpers.

What this means is that all previous remote_<method> helpers have been removed from Rails core and put into the Prototype Legacy Helper. To get UJS hooks into your HTML, you now pass :remote => true instead. For example:

form_for @post, :remote => true

Produces:

<form action="http://host.com" id="create-post" method="post" data-remote="true">

Helpers with Blocks

Helpers like form_for or div_for that insert content from a block use <%= now:

<%= form_for @post do |f| %>
  ...
<% end %>

Your own helpers of that kind are expected to return a string, rather than appending to the output buffer by hand.

Helpers that do something else, like cache or content_for, are not affected by this change, they need &lt;% as before.

Other Changes

Active Model

Active Model is new in Rails 3.0. It provides an abstraction layer for any ORM libraries to use to interact with Rails by implementing an Active Model interface.

ORM Abstraction and Action Pack Interface

Part of decoupling the core components was extracting all ties to Active Record from Action Pack. This has now been completed. All new ORM plugins now just need to implement Active Model interfaces to work seamlessly with Action Pack.

More Information: - Make Any Ruby Object Feel Like ActiveRecord

Validations

Validations have been moved from Active Record into Active Model, providing an interface to validations that works across ORM libraries in Rails 3.

NOTE: All the Rails version 2.3 style validation methods are still supported in Rails 3.0, the new validates method is designed as an additional aid in your model validations, not a replacement for the existing API.

You can also pass in a validator object, which you can then reuse between objects that use Active Model:

class TitleValidator < ActiveModel::EachValidator
  Titles = ['Mr.', 'Mrs.', 'Dr.']
  def validate_each(record, attribute, value)
    unless Titles.include?(value)
      record.errors[attribute] << 'must be a valid title'
    end
  end
end
class Person
  include ActiveModel::Validations
  attr_accessor :title
  validates :title, :presence => true, :title => true
end

# Or for Active Record

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
  validates :title, :presence => true, :title => true
end

There's also support for introspection:

User.validators
User.validators_on(:)

More Information:

Active Record

Active Record received a lot of attention in Rails 3.0, including abstraction into Active Model, a full update to the Query interface using Arel, validation updates and many enhancements and fixes. All of the Rails 2.x API will be usable through a compatibility layer that will be supported until version 3.1.

Query Interface

Active Record, through the use of Arel, now returns relations on its core methods. The existing API in Rails 2.3.x is still supported and will not be deprecated until Rails 3.1 and not removed until Rails 3.2, however, the new API provides the following new methods that all return relations allowing them to be chained together:

More Information:

Enhancements

Patches and Deprecations

Additionally, many fixes in the Active Record branch:

As well as the following deprecations:

NOTE: While an implementation of State Machine has been in Active Record edge for some months now, it has been removed from the Rails 3.0 release.

Active Resource

Active Resource was also extracted out to Active Model allowing you to use Active Resource objects with Action Pack seamlessly.

Deprecations:

Active Support

A large effort was made in Active Support to make it cherry pickable, that is, you no longer have to require the entire Active Support library to get pieces of it. This allows the various core components of Rails to run slimmer.

These are the main changes in Active Support:

The following methods have been removed because they are now available in Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9.

The security patch for REXML remains in Active Support because early patch-levels of Ruby 1.8.7 still need it. Active Support knows whether it has to apply it or not.

The following methods have been removed because they are no longer used in the framework:

Action Mailer

Action Mailer has been given a new API with TMail being replaced out with the new Mail as the email library. Action Mailer itself has been given an almost complete re-write with pretty much every line of code touched. The result is that Action Mailer now simply inherits from Abstract Controller and wraps the Mail gem in a Rails DSL. This reduces the amount of code and duplication of other libraries in Action Mailer considerably.

Deprecations:

More Information:

Credits

See the full list of contributors to Rails for the many people who spent many hours making Rails 3. Kudos to all of them.

Rails 3.0 Release Notes were compiled by Mikel Lindsaar.