Rails 2.0 finally released...

After about a year in the making, Rails 2.0 was finally released in Dec 2007. It is supposedly stuffed with great new features, loads of fixes, and an incredible amount of polish, although I must say I have yet to dive into it. As much as I welcome new features into Rails, I am still trying to learn the old features which are still 'new' features to me. Having started in Ruby on Rails about a year ago, developed an Intranet with it and a couple of small projects, I still find myself trying to get a grip on Rails. As such the old features are still being discovered by myself, as I started to get to be familiar with them in my projects.

With the release of Rails 2.0, I have mixed feeling about it. On one hand, I welcome the many improvements and new features added to it. On the other hand, it can be discouraging, to say the least, because it also means that I have to unlearn some of the things I have just learned in Rails 1.x. And that didn't come easy. Now I find this and that features deprecated, and replaced with new replacements. To learn new stuff is hard enough, and to unlearn things isn't any easier. Thankfully the commands in version 1.x are still valid, and need not be throw out until later down the road.

I have just spend the past hour or so searching on Google for Rails 2.0 cheatsheet, hoping to find one that would help in my transitioning to 2.0. But I have not managed to find one. And Rails 2.0 tutorials are just starting to take forms but still lacking right now. I have been reading from the Agile Web Development with Rails which came out in December 2006, and have not even managed to finish the book thoroughly. And it is already becoming outdated, with Rails 2.0. I guess that is the nature of technology, moving at a fast pace, whether we like the fact or not. Often the lifespan of a new IT product or software could be between 6 months to a year before they become outdated. Sometimes I feel sorry for people who writes IT books, it wouldn't take very long for their books to become outdated, that they would have to start working on the next edition.

Anyhow new improvements also mean better ways to develop projects. So we need to embrace changes, just as in other areas of life.