Rails 2.1 Is Now Available 71
slick50 writes "Rails 2.1 is now available for general consumption with all the features and fixes we've been putting in over the last six months since 2.0. We've had 1,400 contributors creating patches and vetting them. This has resulted in 1,600+ patches. And lots of that has made it into this release. The new major features are: time zones (by Geoff Buesing), dirty tracking, Gem dependencies, named scope (by Nick Kallen), UTC-based migrations, and better caching. As always, you can install with: gem install rails Or you can use the Git tag for 2.1.0."
Re:Wt (Score:1, Insightful)
If it's a major bit of kit, like the Apache HTTP server, then sure, I can trust that the developers have got it mostly right, or that at least if there's a flaw, it'll be widely reported.
But if it's a private app, like most Web applications tend to be, I'd really rather write it in a language that protects against some of the simpler security flaws, like buffer overflows.
So, after the break-in, during the post-mortem... (Score:5, Insightful)
Skillz: "So they nailed you with SQL injection. There is no substitute for knowing WTF."
I'm not claiming that C/C++ are a great choice for web programming, merely bristling at the rejection as "unsafe".
Documentation Sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
Rails and Ruby are nice languages, but they really need to start focusing on their documentation.
The documentation on something as core as DBI returns, "Nothing known about DBI". The website for ruby DBI states that it is a ruby implimenation of Perl DBI. Except that the languages are different and therefore the syntax is different. You spend hours trying to figure out how to use the module.
Rails is much worse. If any documentation exists as all, it's usually behind the web site peepcode for $9 a tutorial. These tutorials are not documentation but serve as a How To for Dummies, leaving you without sufficient knowledge on the scalability, security, or in many cases, any real clue of how to use the code provided.
I have brought this up to the Rails community in my area and was told that if I really wanted to learn what was going on that I needed to read the source code. This was not a single person spouting off an answer but the general concensus of the community.
To find out what public methods are available and how to use them, and even what they do, by trolling through thousands of lines of source code is a sick joke. There is no rational business model that is going to accept this methedology of development and survive in the world for long. It is the availability of fundamental documenation that has made so many languages long standing corner stones of application development.
I'm no great fan of Java, but they have documentation on everything. I continue to use Perl every day because if I don't already know it, I can find the documentation in a few seconds.
And to state that all the documentation is available on some website, which they tend to do, is a little short sighted. I haven't yet managed to get my notebook working in all locations of the planet with internet access that's suitable to store all my documentation. Buses, planes, airports, malls, and many other locations simply don't offer unlimited free internet service. But Perl and Java have local documentation so you don't require internet connectivity to do your job.
Until Ruby & Rails gets their documentation together, they are going to be a minority second class citizen in the world of application development. No company can rationally invest in something that has nothing behind it.