At the Forge - Ruby on Rails 3

After describing Rails 3 so enthusiastically, you might expect that I'll tell you to go out and upgrade whatever Rails 2 applications you might have written immediately. And, indeed, if the application is simple and small, such an upgrade is not a bad idea.

But, if you're like me and work with some large, complex applications, switching is not likely to be a quick or easy process. A large number of queries will need to be rewritten to use Active Relation. The routing table will need to change, the Gemfile will need to be rewritten, and you'll have to double-check your helpers for XSS attacks. This doesn't mean upgrading is a Herculean task, but it's not something to attempt in one evening.

The first thing I would suggest to anyone considering an upgrade is to ensure that your tests, and especially your integration tests, are in place, passing and providing you with adequate test coverage. Once you have such tests in place, you can start the upgrade process, checking at every stage to see what you might have broken.

A plugin called rails_upgrade is available; it provides a Rake task that looks through your code and configuration, tries to determine places where you might encounter problems and points them out to you. If you have good test coverage and run rails_upgrade, you're likely to know where potential problems lie and whether you've broken anything when you try to align your code with Rails 3.

Finally, upgrading to the latest version of Rails 2 (2.3.10, at the time of this writing) is a good way to prep for an upgrade to Rails 3. If you read through your logs, you'll find a number of deprecation warnings that are meant to nudge (push?) you in the direction of Rails 3 compatibility. Even if you don't plan to upgrade right away, getting your code closer to Rails 3 standards won't be a bad thing.

Rails 3 is a terrific upgrade to an already great Web development framework. While it was under development, I followed the blog postings and explanations with some trepidation, wondering how different Rails 3 would be from previous versions. I needn't have worried. As Rails has improved my experience as a Web developer in many small ways, so too has Rails 3 improved on its predecessor with many small changes. I generally like these changes a great deal and believe this shows that Rails still has a lot going for it. Upgrading might be tricky in some cases, but it's worth working in that direction, even if it takes a while. The application's execution speed will improve as a result, but so will your development speed and the maintainability of your code.