We’re plowing through the road map at lightning speed with the release of Rails 0.10.0. There’s so much good stuff in here this time it’s really hard to pick just a few bits to focus on for the overview, but still I have. With Rails 0.10.0, you’ll get:

• Routing: Pretty URLs of all flavors and fashions can now be specified using an easy to understand Routing syntax made in Ruby. This means no more wrestling with mod_rewrite in Apache to get custom URL schemes. It means you’re not bound to the traditional /controller/action/id form (the controller and action names don’t even have to be part of the URL!). It also means that the URL parsing and generation is handled by the same configuration, which removes all the labor previously involved in getting your Ruby code to sync with your rewrite rules. That makes it possible to share the same URL configuration across all the web servers supported by Rails. You can seemlessly develop your application on WEBrick and without changes move it to Apache or lighttpd. Read more in the Routing book, see a bunch of routes explained, or dig into the ActionController::Base#url_for API documentation.

• Web Services: Action Web Service is a whole new add-on framework for Action Pack that enables SOAP with WSDL and XML-RPC web services to be made with Rails ease. You can either describe an existing controller with an API, and let the clients interact with the same methods used to do the HTTP interface, or you can create dedicated service classes that can be bound to a controller. In addition to the support for building web services, we’ve also added convenient wrappers for calling other web services from your application. For getting started, there’s a whole book on Action Web Service that explains how to define, implement, and interact with the web serivce APIs. We also got examples using the GoogleSearch API and the metaWeblogApi.

• Components: With components it’s possible to call other actions and controllers for their rendered response while executing another action. You can either delegate the entire response rendering or you can mix a partial response in with your other content. This makes it possible to package functionality in reusable parts and to keep more DRY on application elements that integrate from many sources (like a dashboard). To learn more about components, we have another book, a video showing how to make and call components, and the API docs.

• Oracle: In addition to the existing adapters for MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, SQL Server, and DB2, we now also support Oracle as a database option for Active Record. The adapter that made it in is built on top of OCI8 and has been confirmed to work great with Oracle 8i and 9i. Our sixth database adapter is documented in the API.

But there’s a world of additional new and fixed stuff in 0.10.0. See the other whole new package Active Support and check the changelogs for Rails, Active Record, Action Pack, and Action Mailer.

Honoring Nicholas Seckar and Leon Breedt

The two most important features in this release has been contributed to two relative newcomers to the Rails scene. Nicholas Seckar tried at least three attempts at Routing before we found the one that felt like the best Rails fit. He put an enormous amount of energy into sorting out all the complications and have since helped to improve all parts of Rails. You’ve done a superb job, Nicholas. May potential employeers looking for talent see your name.

Equal thanks goes to Leon Breedt that popped out of nowhere with a whole new framework that followed our established conventions and approach to the dot. The quality of the code and documentation has made a big impression on the existing team of core contributors. And the work has contributed to make us all the much closer to 1.0. Thanks for the excellent work, Leon!

So how far away is Rails 1.0?

Rails 1.0 moved much closer today as we knocked off well over half of the previously announced road map. What we primarily lack now is Packaging and Performance alongside the aim to bring the number of uninvestigated and/or fixed fault tickets down to zero. The current tentative date is end of March/start of April.

Upgrading from Rails 0.9.5 to 0.10.0

If you don’t have any custom URLs defined in your existing application, then it’s a fairly straight forward process to upgrade. If you do have custom URLs, it’s a bit more work, but definitely manageable. Basecamp used a lot of custom URL tricks and it took me under an hour and resulted in 100 lines of code being stripped from the application. In any case, we’ve created a book to guide the upgrade process.