This past weekend I was in Portland, Oregon attending Rails Conference 2008.  It was a great event and I learned a lot.  The event lasted from Thursday to Sunday and I was able to attend quite a few tutorials, sessions, and presentations.  There were nearly 2000 rails developers in attendance!   I was impressed with the Conference Center and the catered meals that were provided.  I thought the event was very organized.

What really stood out for me was the presentation on Rails 2.1 which was made available over the weekend.  Rails 2.1 has a lot of great new features including better caching, gem dependencies, and time zone support.  One new addition that really struck my attention was versioned migrations.  A time stamp will now be at the beginning of the migration filename.  Having version control to my migrations will save me a lot of headaches.

Now you can do this:

script/generate migration one
      create  db/migrate/20080402122512_one.rb

The number at the end is a time stamp.  You can then retrack your steps by typing:

rake db:migrate:up VERSION=20080402122512

One other cool addition is the modification to ActiveRecord.  Say you wanted to find all your blog posts.  The command would be Post.find(:all).  With Rails 2.1, we’ll be able to simply write Post.all and Post.first.  Seems pretty intuitive.

I know it’ll probably take a little bit of work to upgrade my applications, but you gotta hand it to the Rails Team.  Version 2.1 is awesome!