Andre Lewis on Tech

See What's new in Rails 1.1

The RJS Templates will get a lot of attention:

The basic idea: in addition to .rhtml (Ruby HTML) templates, you can create .rjs (Ruby JavaScript) ones. In them, you can write Ruby code that will generate JavaScript code, which is sent as the result of an Ajax call, and evaluated by the browser.

I am very excited about the Active Record improvements. One example is "Cascading eager loading," which will make a difference in Rail's weakest area, performance:

Cascading eager loading allows for queries like Author.find(:all, :include=> { :posts=> :comments }), which will fetch all authors, their posts, and the comments belonging to those posts in a single query.

Which will let you do:

 # Single database query:
  companies = Company.find(:all, :include => { 
    :groups => { :members=> { :favorites } } })

  # No database query caused: 
  companies[0].groups[0].members[0].favorites[0].name