The call went out the other day for participants in the Rails 3.0pre BugMash on Jan 16th – 17th. Included were some imple instructions for cloning Rails 3 and creating a new Rails app from it. So I pulled it down and gave Rails 3 a test spin.

Project

I decided to start a project for making a sort of universal friends list. One that encorporates XFN tags and OpenID. The data could then be used as a resource for other sites to seed a friends list. In order to claim an OpenID as your own you need to authenticate it.

Bundler

The first thing I noticed was the existance of the Gemfile in the rails root and how empty config/environment.rb is. I’d read on about the new bundler and thought it was going to be painful, but I was wrong, it was actually a joy. It even removed gem after I commented out the requirement statement in the Gemfile.

Plugins

I installed Authlogic as a plugin, after failing to get it working as a gem. I’ve had the same issue with Rails 2.3 so I don’t think this is an issue with Rails 3. The OpenId Authentication plugin worked fine as well.

Routes

The new routing module took a little getting used to, but after a few mistakes I got it working correctly. In the end config/routes.rb looks much cleaner, and still contains lots of commented samples. Also the legacy routing is commented by default, which is nice since that’s something I do anyway.

Premade .gitignore

Speaking of nice defaults, creating the rails app made .gitignore file for me with tmp / db / log already in it. Very Nice!

View validation

One thing that came as a bit of a surprise to me that the views are validated against the models. If you reference a field on the model in the view that does not exist, Rails will now error and tell you that it’s not there. So you need to rake db:migrate to have it recognize the fields on a model.

Conclusion

I have really liked what I see of Rails 3 thus far. Thanks to all those that have worked on it. I think that I will start using this version by default.