What's New in Edge Rails #1

A few of you might remember I used to write a weekly wrap-up for the official Rails weblog. For one reason and another, that's not happening any more. But I'm starting to want to keep a closer eye on Rails again, and this is a good way for me to make myself do so. No guarantees that I'll keep this up, but let me know if it's useful.

If you want to know about every little detail, then you should be reading the commit logs yourself. I'm just going to pick out things that look especially significant or shiny to me. Your mileage may vary.

Week of 12/18-24/2011

• Of course there was some version change news this week. 9d6e52b55ec67d0573a0bb1900b13f38e18f7eba bumped master to 3.2RC1 - The highlights are in the Rails weblog. With that out of the way, Rails master has become 4.0.0.beta at 632fa15fa4ceec6dbb00bf26da249d3039749f50. Here's some notes from DHH about what to expect. The big news so far: only Ruby 1.9.3+ will be supported.
• Starting with 8cb7bc8b55e8054f66cd58840392e6cc63134a90 and continuing for the next few commits, ActiveRecord supports PostgreSQL hstore columns directly. That's the native KV store for PostgreSQL.
• validates_numericality_of gained an :other_than option (validates_numericality_of :approved, :other_than => 0) at 0fe311a7fcf1457b9a72f99f887f756a28a53db4.
• Whiny nils are finally gone in 4f6af26a886630c97865a2e5023a9560692e6aa4. One less thing to try to explain to Rails newcomers.
• Generating models and migrations from the command line got more flexible in 7a47f362c8246c20437f49111e5dcc0781d6d024. You can now specify that an attribute has an index (country:string:index) or a unique index (tracking_id:integer:uniq) and pass options to string (city:string:limit{32}) and decimal (price:decimal{7,2}) attributes.
• There's a new ActiveRecord::Model module that you can include as an alternative to inheriting from ActiveRecord::Base. Check out the full changelog message on this one at 00318e9bdfc346a57cab34b2ec3724f3e9605ac1.
• Rails Guides support for Kindle's .mobi format landed in 8eb359661745adc639d43cf7da9a92fc1f6c9539.
• Best commit message of the week: "This test is rubbish." 2d5f5c32e6a172863e08a1eecea39b69b1d23d14