Developers are always interested in new software development tools because, potentially at least, they give them the ability to implement new features or capabilities that older software tools can’t. For example, the developers behind Twitter chose the relatively new Ruby on Rails as its development platform.
Developers have been anxiously awaiting delivery of the latest version of Ruby on Rails. DevX reports on the status of a release candidate and the Ruby on Rails 3 finished version that will follow.
At the end of 2008, the open source Ruby on Rails and Merb Ruby frameworks merged together in an effort to unify development of Ruby on Rails 3. Fast forward 18 months and Ruby on Rails 3 (RoR) has yet to be officially released, though a release candidate is set for this week.
With the RoR 3 release, the open source development framework is being overhauled to provide more modularity and greater power compared to the current RoR 2 framework.
“We just spent a year and a half refactoring the whole thing, so there is a huge amount of internal improvement which mostly manifests itself as improvements in plugins,” Yehuda Katz, a member of the Ruby on Rails core team and Rails framework architect at Engine Yard, told InternetNews.com.
Katz added that the framework overall was improved, with better dependency management and API improvements. Katz explained that the first year of the Rails 3 effort was largely consumed with refactoring the Rails codebase.