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Closed 11 years ago.
Now that the Rails 3 beta is here, let's take a little straw poll.
Please tell us briefly what your application does and when you will upgrade it to Rails 3. Or, if you're not planning on upgrading any time soon, tell us what's stopping you.
Honestly? When developers wake up and start work on Rails 3/Ruby 1.9 in their gems and plugins. They know it's been coming for several months now, and most haven't even bothered to upgrade. One in particular that I'd like to point out is authlogic, one of the most used authentication plugins out there. It still doesn't work for Rails 3.
Whoops!
I'm not planning to. I'm sure I'm in a very small minority, but my big application is still running 1.2.6. Each time I consider making the effort to upgrade it seems Rails changes again.
It does what I want it to do, makes good money, and despite feeling more and more left out in the cold I just don't have a sufficiently compelling reason to update it.
All my Rails apps are currently running under Rails 2.3.5 and every app has a LOC of 80% or greater. This has always been a key requirement for every product I create for myself or I manage at work.
Usually, upgrading to a minor/bugfix release is just a matter of a few minutes.
Change GEM version, upgrade requirements, run tests, fix issues and commit.
Rails 3.0 is a major rewrite and the biggest problem is represented by plugin compatibility.
Plugins are not under my direct control. This is the same reason why I had hard time trying to upgrade to Ruby 1.9.1.
However, I'm already playing with Rails 3. I want to learn the most important changes of Rails 3 as soon as possible in order to start moving the existing apps to the right directions. Moreover, as a plugin author, it's important to me to start working with Rails 3 in order to make my plugins compatible.
Yesterday I start with my most simple app. Well, at least this is what I was used to think about it. Anyway, it is the app with the lower number of external dependencies (less than 3 Gems) and it took about 1 hour to upgrade and 3 hour to figure out why Rails was failing to load my routes. It turned out, the Rails Metal component was fighting with the new Rails 3 stack.
There are some minor issues I have to figure out, but I can say I successfully migrated my first app to Rails 3.
I'm planning to migrate all my Rails apps to Rails 3 as soon as possible, once Rails 3 stable will be available. Or at least, as soon as I can figure out whether the dependencies actually work with Rails 3. Fortunately, a project has been started at http://railsplugins.org/ with the intent of listing all compatible/incompatible Rails plugins.
My remote environment is already compatible with Rails 3, I'm using Passenger with Ruby Enterprise Edition (1.8.7). The only blocking issue are plugins.
I guess it would take at least one month before having the major part of my Rails app ready for Rails 3 thought I won't probably start the upgrade until Rails 3 stable is out or I really need the new version for some blocking feature (ex. subdomain-based routing).
I'm not going to upgrade any apps to rails 3.
However, I just decided that all new projects will be rails3 going forward. The lack of plugin support isn't a big issue as I see it as an opportunity to decouple my apps from plugins so that I can swap them in and out as I please later.
I also suspect that the big plugins will upgrade very quickly as they won't want to be left in the dust.
Keep track of plugin status here.
I've been keeping my apps on the edge of 2.3, but since there's a lot of fundamental changes to Rails in 3, I'll probably install the beta, work on converting them over and hope to be ready by the time it's released as stable.
I'm also glad there's a lot of lead time before RailsConf so I can really get familiar with the new features of Rails 3 and won't feel lost/overwhelmed there.
I don't think I'll upgrade any of my applications. It would be a large amount of work compared to what I'd gain from it. Also in some cases the plugins/gems I used in my app are not compatible with Rails 3 so upgrading would be impossible or would require to fork the gems... too time consuming.
If I had to update, I'd probably wait a bit more for all the gems/plugins to be updated to Rails 3. Of course any new application I'll develop will be done using Rails 3.
I'll answer my own question.
I'm not sure how many betas there are going to be for Rails 3, but I'm going to hold off converting my blog application until the next beta or the final release. I think it's going to be quite a time-consuming process because I have a lot of view helpers that build markup, a lot of named scopes and some quite complicated routing.
I want to add page caching first before tackling Rails 3!
After trying out the beta and it not wanting to work with any commands, I have decided to wait until a new beta.
The ticket has already been opened for the issue.
After realising that I probably spend more time in Zend Framework and Doctrine getting code to work (fixing framework bugs, annoying language workarounds, and just plain pain), than actually coding features I decided that it's finally time to give RoR a go. Especially as RoR3 is now out with a bunch of documentation.
5 hours through and it's looking really promising. 1 hour of it was debugging though, some documentation on a plugin was not up to speed, but alas I'm there.
It's interesting, and does seem to be in a better direction. More time to code on features, and less time coding to debug.
So the app I'm converting is my premium CMS that is deployed in over 20 websites now, and powers my own balupton.com - so will be interesting, as the CMS is already a complete featured cms.
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I built (hacked) my web app by extending Michael Hartl's Rails 3 tutorial, only to discover that my web hosting service requires Rails 2.3.8. I am a complete newbie to Ruby/Rails, and was wondering how feasible a downgrade from Rails 3.x to Rails 2.x would be.
Unfortunately my webhost is not able to upgrade to Rails 3.
Edit
To be more specific: my application is largely based on the tutorial mentioned above. I am looking to determine what type of effort is involved in downgrading the Rails 3 tutorial application into a Rails 2 application. I will try it out anyway, but due to my inexperience with Ruby / Rails, before I started I just wanted to get an idea of what to expect (i.e., if there will be a lot of syntax changes, or will I have to restructure the file directory, etc.)
You do NOT want to do this, it's a really bad idea, You'll end up chasing your tail forever with weird error messages and when yuo ask about them you'll be a very unusual case.
Either
Find a host that support Rails 3, while you get ready for Rails 4 (tee-hee)
Seek out of of the (many) books on amazon or ebay that cater to rails 2 (still probably a majority at this point).
Use Heroku - many people are using Heroku to go live for free and then be low cost when more's needed.
The main thing here about rails is that the versions advance quickly - and the code structure changes a lot with each version. You have to work much harder to avoid technical debt than with other, more mature, technologies.
Agree with the 'new host' suggestions. I haven't downgraded an app, but the upgrades I've done have taken weeks on large apps. So my answer is that it's not feasible enough for me to want to try, and I've been using Rails for years.
I've had a cheap Dreamhost account for years, and they stay up to date. I've also heard good things about bluehost. Note that both of these shared providers are "get what you pay for," but if you value your time, it's certainly worth $7 or whatever the monthly fee is to not spend your time downgrading the app.
It can be done though if that's what you really want. But it is a lot of work. I remember upgrading one very large app from rails 2 to rails 3. You will need to do this reversely. I had to solve gem compatibility(some gems only work with rails 3 and it might be harder to get support for rails 2 now), active record had a different API in the past versions, I'm not even sure if there was the chaining feature. E.g. instead of Model.where, you would often write Model.find(:conditions => {...}), if you're using generic ajax helpers(with :remote => true) that appeared in rails 3, then these would not work. Plus I would also scan the rails changelog for any security patches that were done in rails 3 just to be sure. Could be that you will have to tighten security on some places on your own in the older version. If you have your app test covered (and I hope you do :-)) than there might be some problems with older versions of rspec or cucumber but generally these were not so big. I think gem compatibility is the greatest issue. The rest is more or less mechanical work. Find and replace.
Good luck with that but as was said before, if you can switch your hosting then I advise to do so and stick to the latest version of rails.
We are currently running rails 2.1.
My main motivation for the upgrade is the fear that gems/plugins will get rarer/unavailable/unsupported day by day for our version (,and the excitement of the latest technology).
I understand there are many-many improvements that come with rails3, but probably what my manager would want to listen is the advantages that he'd get, in terms of the business.
Ours is a Saas application, load on the app is not very high, but the demand for reliability is more.
Edit :
Looks like my inclination towards the upgrade needs rethinking, so answers to "should I upgrade" are welcome.
my original question also needs answers - how to describe the business advantages of an upgrade from rails2.1 -> rails3.
The app is under active development/enhancements.
The longer you go without upgrading, the harder it will be when the time comes. Sooner or later, any actively maintained project is going to have to move up to the more recent versions, and the more versions you have to skip along the way, the harder and more risky it will be. If you upgrade regularly, it becomes a fairly simple maintenance task.
I'm afraid that going from 2.1 -> 3.0 is going to be a fairly rough one unless your app is pretty simple. You might try going from 2.1 -> 2.3.9 as a first step. However, doing it now, instead of when it's 2.1 -> 3.1 will save you heartache. Right now, everyone is focused on helping people upgrade. A year from now, there will be fewer fresh resources available and fewer people going out of their way to help people upgrade.
If your application is under development and is likely to have more and more features over the months to come then you should migrate to the newer and actively supported version.
If your application only needs bug fixes occasionally then you should stick to the current version.
Upgrade!
I'd say that you should definitely upgrade, for the reasons you stated, but don't rush it. If you have a well defined test suite everything should be ok.
Most of core Rails 2.x code works with Rails 3, you can just read the deprecation warnings and fix things one by one. You can also use the official Rails Upgrade plugin to automate the bulk of the editing.
As for the gems and plugins you use, you can check their compatibility at railsplugins.org and decide if it's worth the trouble if any.
And the elevator pitch for the boss: You said the app is under development, so upgrading later when you absolutely have to means that you have to first deal with all the issues arising under 2.x and then deal with the upgrade issues plus 3.0 issues of a much bigger app. Upgrading now saves time by saving you the trouble of having to deal with 2.x issues. And you also avoid some of the upgrade issues since your app is probably much leaner now than the heavyweight it will be when you decide to upgrade later.
Since reliability is high on priority, you should probably not upgrade unless it's absolutely required. Some unforeseen issue is bound to come up.
To address the excitement of the latest technology, you can always try out new plugins and Rails 3 offline.
Businesses should not be sandboxes of developers. Nor should development be Resume Driven.
But that's just my opinion. :)
There are several reasons to upgrade, all of which are under the assumption that the app is and will continue to be under active development.
Integration with 3rd party software- for example, rails 1 did not have ActiveSupport. An app remaining on rails1 all through say rails 2 might want to integrate with a 3rd party API that primarily supports restful json. At that point, the sensibile path is to upgrade, but since you delayed it so long your risk of having lots of issues in the upgrade will be significantly greater than if you upgraded early.
Using plugins that will help with new features - if you want to add a new feature and someone has scratched your itch already, then if you are stuck on an older version of rails you will have to write that code yourself. The more code you have to write yourself, the greater the likelyhood of bugs and the more maintaince the code will likely require, depending on the function.
Fixing bugs in older verisons of the plugins/gems - if you encounter a bug in rails, or a plugin, or a gem, or some sort of other integration issue, it might be fixed in a later version, but what that depends on a newer version of rails. This will make your path to fixing said bug or implementing said enhancement greater the longer you wait to upgrade.
I heard Rails 3 is almost ready to be released from beta, meaning its a stable version. But of course the real date still unknown.
So I'm looking for advice from a good RoR developer. Do you think I should learn and use Rails 3 RC version or use Rails 2.3.8? If I use the RC version now will it be hard to upgrade to the stable Rails 3 version?
Is there a decent RoR developer out there than can offer some guidance?
Thanks.
I don't know what a rock developer (!) is, but I'd recommend going with Rails 3 rather than Rails 2.x. Rails 3 represents the future direction of Ruby on Rails, so it's worth getting up to speed with it as soon as you can. To be frank, Rails 2.x is now an evolutionary dead-end. There shouldn't be any significant changes between the Rails 3 Release Candidate and the final version.
The barriers to adopting Rails 3 you might encounter are:
its availability on your production stack
plugin/gem compatibility
For the first issue, I know that the popular Heroku for example are tracking the Rails 3 beta releases pretty closely. Regarding the second issue, not all plugins or gems are compatible at the moment, but a lot of the most popular ones are. If there are specific plugins or gems that you need to use then check here.
If you need to get a project off the ground now, then by all means go with Rails 2.3.8. It's the safe choice.
There are some significant changes in Rails 3. Some tools will be available to help you upgrade. But no automated tool will ever completely convert your 2.3.8 application to Rails 3. It's hard to tell how much effort is involved, that really depends on your application.
That said, if you are new, learning, and not expecting to release anything for several months, Rails 3 is the right choice. By the time your grok Rails and have something in production, Rails 3 will likely have stabilized, and nobody will be looking back.
Use rails 3!! The RC is still in the pipeline, but it's more or less good to go and you won't need to make any code changes when the final release is made
Here are some reasonable resources to get you started with it
http://railscasts.com
http://www.railsdispatch.com/
http://www.teachmetocode.com/
http://rubyonrails.org/screencasts/rails3/
Now that Rails 3.0 beta has been released, should I spend time building my first Rails application on 2.3 or does it make more sense to use the beta?
I'd suggest sticking with the non-beta version (2.3). Chances are tutorials and/or webcasts you might use are for the older version. Go for version 3 only if it includes features you actually need that are not in 2.3.
If you plan on actually building something with Rails, go with version 2.3 because it's, well, not a beta (stable), and because most tutorials are geared towards the 2.x series.
If you're just going to mess with it, I say go with version 3 for two reasons: you'll be better prepared when it does come out, and you get to play with the new features. But if you're not going to do anything serious with it, it doesn't really matter which you pick, so it's your call.
I disagree with other answers. Rails 3 does a number of things differently than 2.3. You should learn right away the new way to code. It's not harder and you won't have time to re-learn in a few short weeks.
Rails 3 beta is stable enough. You will run into few problems.
Your learning. Use something that is stable. Rail 2.3.x is stable and 3.0 is not.
If you are strapped on a deadline for your app, use Rails 2.3.
But I encourage you to use Rails 3.0 as it'll teach you a lot about the framework works when you do encounter problems.
I'm in the preliminary stages of designing a new web application, and have yet to begin any sort of implementation. The application models a fairly complex domain, and I'd feel more comfortable using tools such as the ruby DataMapper ORM (having using NHibernate in the .net world) than Rails Active Record. I also prefer jquery over prototype. All of these considerations of course point to using Merb, yet I'm aware that Merb is being merged into Rails for version 3 and will no longer exist as a distinct framework.
Is there any sense in starting work on the implementation of the application now given the fairly profound changes coming to rails? I'd really like to know if it would be worth starting development in Merb now and then porting it to Rails, but I've yet to find anything suggesting how difficult this may be. Another approach would be to start work on the domain now in Rails, and only give consideration to the ORM and frontend once v3 is released.
In essence, I'd like to know how portable a Merb app is going to be to Rails 3, but am aware that it may be too early for anyone other than the core developers to know this.
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks :)
-------------- Edit ---------------
Yehuda Katz, lead developer of the Merb project has this to say on his blog:
The plan is to start working on Rails immediately, and to continue fixing bugs and resolving other major issues in Merb in the interim. We will also release versions of Merb specifically designed to help ease the transition to Rails 3.
In particular, we will do Merb releases with deprecation notices and other transitional mechanisms to assist developers in tracking down the changes that will come between Merb 1.x and Rails 3. Expect a number of interim releases that get incrementally closer to Rails 3, and expect parts of Merb (most notably the helpers) to be ported to run on Rails 3 in order to further reduce friction.
To be perfectly clear: we are not abandoning the Merb project. There are many production applications running on Merb that are relying on both timely bug fixes and a clear path to the future. If you’re using Merb today, continue using Merb. If you’re considering using Merb for a project because it works better for your needs, use Merb. You will not be left in the cold and we’re going to do everything to make sure that your applications don’t get stuck in the past.
If you’ve already learned Merb, we will be working hard to make sure that you can parlay that knowledge into Rails 3. At Engine Yard, we fully intend to continue using Merb for our internal apps until Rails 3 is out, but we will be using those (non-trivial) applications to be sure the experience is smooth for everyone. There will be no huge jumps and you will not need to rewrite your application from scratch.
It's never a good time to start a complex application on a framework, really. It seems like there's always a major upgrade coming up or some other competing framework that may be a better bet. If you're having more success with Merb, stick with that right now and develop your project without fear! Both the Rails and Merb communities are going to have to cope with the merging of the projects with the release of Rails 3, but that's going to be awhile.
The project merge doesn't mean that Merb will be going away, however. Yehuda Katz will stop being the lead developer, but someone will take over the project. At the minimum, you can expect security patches and bug fixes for a few years, as long as you follow the official Merb developers' repository. Likely, after the Rails 3 release, you'll find great walk-throughs on upgrading your Rails 2.x/Merb 1.x application to Rails 3.