Rails 1.0. So whats next?
December 16th, 2005 So Ruby On Rails makes it to the "grand 1.0.0":http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/articles/2005/12/13/rails-1-0-party-like-its-one-oh-oh. 15 months and a lot of hype later its about time too. I don't think i've seen an opensource project make so much ground before even having a 1.0 release out. But it has to be said this is a very complete release having just about everything a web framework should. And thats the real issue, there isn't really much else that should go into the core framework before its going to lead to serious Bloat. In fact DHH has hinted many times tha he really doesn't want to see much more in features pumped into the Rails core. So what's next? Well, hinted at the RailsConf were three projects supporting Rails from a development standpoint from the core team. This is where they will be focusing in the near future. h3. SwitchTower We know about this one. "SwitchTower":http://manuals.rubyonrails.com/read/book/17 is a utility that simplifies deployments to multiple Rails installations. It does deployments, rollbacks, restarts and is a essentially part of any development technology trying to make professional in-roads. If you are using Rails on TextDrive its worth checking out "Shovel":http://nubyonrails.com/pages/shovel a SwitchTower specifically for Lighttpd on TextDrive. h3. Gauge Is to monitor in real-time distributed Rails applications. Don't know much about this yet but i'm guessing its going to be DRB based, but i'm hoping for maybe SNMP support. Email based notifications would also be good. Cache-kicking hopefully. One of the main problems of stability on Rails applications seems to be around hanging FCGI processes so it would be good to see some monitoring capability. h3. Conductor Tools making development easier. The example DHH gave was to have a web interface with a CocoaMySQL-like interface for dealing with fixtures in Active Record. Naked Objects was mentioned in relation to making scaffolding more permanent. I'm for development tools, and good ones are going to make Rails a lot better. But scaffolding is a white-elephant, real applications don't need and want it. It may look great on the videos but make it more complex and it get away from the easy-development facility. I wouldn't like to see Rails move to a code generation framework, history has proved these wrong already. I'd like to see some good stuff from this, but just can't think of anything i want right now. What i would like to see is some auto-complete (like in IRB) built right into my editor, maybe some integrated API lookups, but all this is going to depend on what IDE people use. I like "TextMate":http://www.macromates.com but people are using Eclipse and what knows else. Good times ahead? I should coco.
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