Nearly four years after its initial release, Ruby on Rails is edging ever closer to version 2.1. Rails 0.5 was released June 24 of 2004, and its creator David Heinemeier Hansson hopes that v2.1,  currently in release candidate state, will be out any moment. "We’ve been adding a ton of extra deliciously nice goodies in preparation of its release," blogged Heinemeier Hansson just last month.



View David Heinemeier Hansson, Creator of Ruby on Rails, on SYS-CON.TV

Rails is a full-stack framework for developing database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Control pattern. From the AJAX in the view, to the request and response in the controller, to the domain model wrapping the database, Rails gives you a pure-Ruby development environment. To go live, all you need to add is a database and a web server.

According to Ryan Daigle, improvements coming in version 2.1 Include:

• Gem Dependencies
• Dirty tracking with partial updates
• has_finder in the form of named_scope
• Built-in timezone support
• Better caching infrastructure

David Heinemeier Hansson is one of the many front-end engineering gurus who have over the years featured on the Speaker Faculty of the AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo series. Other speakers include:

• Ruby on Rails Creator Says: "Reduce the Risk, Hire Programmers From Open Source"
• James Gosling: "Java Is Under No Serious Threat From PHP, Ruby or C#"
• Bringing Ruby to the Enterprise
• Ruby vs. Java Myths Deconstructed
• Java Remains #1 Programming Language, But Ruby Is Now 10th
• Ruby-on-Rails Start-up Gets $6.2m in Funding
• Why Do 'Cool Kids' Choose Ruby or PHP to Build Websites Instead of Java?