Rails 3.0 release candidate unexpectedly delayed at last minute

After expecting to put out a release candidate Tuesday of Ruby on Rails 3.0, the latest major upgrade to the popular Web development framework, developers of Rails instead decided to put out a fourth beta version and wait until the end of the week for the release candidate.

Usually the last phase before a general release, a release candidate “was the original plan, [but] last-minute, we decided to call it another beta and give it a few more days,” said David Heinemeier Hansson, founder of Rails, on Tuesday evening.

Developers of Rails figured they would give Rails users gathered at the RailsConf technical conference in Baltimore this week some more time to test the upgrade, Hansson said. “We prefer to get [the release candidate] out before the end of this conference,” he said.

[ Hansson recently was dismissive of a analyst report that did not reflect kindly on Rails. See InfoWorld’s report. ]

Version 3.0 is set to feature a merger with the rival Merb framework as well as enhancements for REST and JavaScript. Hansson, meanwhile, laid out some goals for a planned Rails 3.1 release.

Features sought for Rails 3.1 include asset pipelining that can auto-compile sprite images as well as output flushing, for loading of CSS and JavaScript before the entire page is rendered. A new migration API is desired as well, Hansson said.

Hansson presented Tuesday at the conference: “My talk was highlighting my favorite features in Rails and how they solve more complex problems with even simpler solutions than what we have today,” Hansson said in his email. Among features he cited were an Active Record Query API, a routing API, and an Action Mailer API.

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