Practicalmadness

Ruby on Rails version 1.1, a rather lovely upgrade to your humble narrator’s favorite web framework, just released today. Big ups to the Rails core team and everyone in the community who contributed to the release.

To everyone building a Rails app right now, your lives just got a whole lot cooler. I used one of the biggest new Rails 1.1 features, RJS templates, in this year’s Oscars Game for the “live” scoreboard/winners display on Oscar Night, and we’re relying heavily on the new polymorphic associations for a client project we’re working on at Killswitch Collective.

The announcement at the Rails blog describes all the delicious new features and improvements, and a post by Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson on 37signals’s Signal vs. Noise blog explains the ancestry of some Rails 1.1 features that were extracted from recent/upcoming 37s products.

And elsewhere on the web:

• 37signals developer and Rails Core member Jamis Buck explains the new respond_to feature, which does for web service APIs what Rails 0.11 did for Ajax — it makes adding an API almost as easy as not to.

• Mike Clark describes some lesser-known features and improvements in Rails 1.1

• Dan Benjamin, who wrote — IMHO — the very best tutorial for getting Rails running on Mac OS X Tiger, has a follow-up today on updating your Rails to 1.1 on Mac OS X.

• DreamHost botched their upgrade to Rails 1.1 and had to roll back to version 1.0 while they work out the kinks. D’oh!

• But what the kids really wanna know is: is it faster? Stefan Kaes has the facts and he’s voting yes: Rails 1.1 is up to 11% faster under certain circumstances.

• Speaking of that fine Mike Clark fellow, he’s back with an introduction to Running Your Rails App Headless. See, in 1.1 they’ve not only added the new Integration Testing framework, they’ve exposed it to script/console, for easier and more powerful poking and prodding. Very cool.