Rails 2.1 Is Now Available

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:I love Ruby and Rails, don't get me wrong...

[setagllib]

I really don't know how Ruby gets away with having such bad encoding support. Java and Python both solved that problem long ago, and Python 3 gets even more Java-like by having the standard string type be unicode. Heck, even C++ frameworks solved it. Meanwhile Ruby makes encodings just as hard as in C, if not harder.

Re:I love Ruby and Rails, don't get me wrong...

[JanneM]

That's a bit weird. AFAIK, Ruby 1.9 takes the encoding you use system-wide as the default - if the "2009" above is interpreted as 8-bit ascii, it means that's the encoding for the environment you start ruby in.

Re:Wt

[Anonymous Coward]

Very interesting--thanks for the link! My twenty-second look over their "Hello, World!" example shows that the output source is terrible (like so many generated-source frameworks). This is a big downside for me, since I like my XHTML-valid output.

Definitely bookmarked, though.

Re:Wt

[bertilow]

Brilliant! The WT page states that WT "Generates standards compliant HTML or XHTML code". But the page itself is not valid, and the gorram "Hello world"-example is also not valid, and - as it seems - the same goes for all other WT examples on that site! No, I don't think I will use WT.

Re:I love Ruby and Rails, don't get me wrong...

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't seem to understand how Unicode Collation algorithms work.
http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr10/

They are not perfect, but they are FAR better than.. putting every non ASCII character last in a sort, so anything with an accent will be put in the end. That's the way Python and Ruby does it unless you reimplement yourself an ad-hoc, ill-specified, bug-ridden subset of unicode collation algorithms without knowing it.

Unicode collation standards do take into account the specifics of a language as much as possible. Go see section 1.3 on the link and the level of complexity unicode can deal with, like the stupid french accents rules that state that the last accent in a word is the one which determinate order.

Java implements collation classes, you tell the locale/language to the sorting algorithm and it will get its collation comparator.

Ruby and Python only implements the bare minimum to support unicode, unfortunately.