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The Rails team have now made Rails 1.1 an official release. As DDH put in his post:

The biggest upgrade in Rails history has finally arrived. Rails 1.1 boasts more than 500 fixes, tweaks, and features from more than 100 contributors. Most of the updates just make everyday life a little smoother, a little rounder, and a little more joyful.

I’ve had it on my machine for a while, but have not really delved into the new features. I look forward to trying out the new ActiveRecord stuff though as that’s an area where I’ve had to build lots of workarounds due to restrictions before. Plus the respond_to feature of ActionController also looks cool.

After reading about it a lot, I finally got round to installing Ruby on Rails onto my Powerbook. Oh and for those scratching their heads, Ruby on Rails is a framework for building web applications fast and was used to create sites like Odeo and Backpack.

It was actually a fairly simple process, just a matter of going through the help docs. One thing I will pass on though. Once I had it installed and started and had the built in WEBrick server running. I would go to the URL of my app and it wouldn’t work. Anyway to cut a long story short instead of using http://localhost/myApp, if I used http://127.0.0.1/myApp everything worked. This only took me about 8 hours to work out

I also downloaded the new book ‘Agile Web Development with Rails’. It should be available in print by the end of the month but as I was going on holiday I thought it might be nice to gen up while I was away.

Well, it is indeed a fast way to develop. I had a working app that could easily read write and edit to a database in about 10mins. I am still learning but I am really getting on at speed. Once you’ve got your head around how the framework operates complex tasks are generally do-able in a couple of lines or code. To finish, here’s a great link to a movie that explains how you can build a blog engine in 15mins with Ruby on Rails