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Ruby on Rails Turns 2.0

The latest and greatest version of the open source web development framework - Ruby on Rails - is now available. Version 2.0 is a web framework that supports the use of REST-ful web services and says bye bye to SOAP.

Rails is a complete application development framework that enables you to create full service database-backed web applications: collaboration, community, e-commerce, content management, statistics. This newest release, in the making for over four and a half years, has a number of improvements.

But before we get to the release notes, let’s get one thing straight: Rails is the framework and Ruby is the programming language that you use to develop within the framework.

Ruby on Rails was created by David Heinemeier Hansson, a partner at 37signals. It has been extended and improved by a core team and hundreds of open-source contributors.

People are bursting with anticipation, so what’s all the hype about?

REST Web Services

The biggest change to the framework is that it has done away with developing Web Services using SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and has joined the ranks of Web 2.0 by moving to REST (Representational State Transfer).

REST, a style of software architecture for the Web, is an approach that describes any simple interface that transmits domain-specific data over HTTP. It uses simple XML+HTTP interfaces and is said to have huge improvements in performance (because of caching capabilities), scalability and less dependence on vendor software.

No real surprise that the open source community would take hold of it and go to town.

Security Improvements

Security enhancements also are featured in this new version:

• Easier to protect against phishing with provisions to guard against CRSF (cross-site request forgery) intrusions
• Safeguards against XSF (cross-site forgery) attacks are included as well.

Other Improvements

• Improved testing support
• Critical to application updates, the ability for applications to emit Atom feeds
• ActiveResource framework: encapsulation of web services to make it easy to use databases (similar to ActiveRecord)

So are you ready to start developing on this new framework?

Head on over to their site and start downloading. Important note to keep in mind is you need v2.0.1 (v2.0.0 has a bug found just after release).

Happy programming!