New Project > Rails 2 or 3 ?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hey,

Working on a project for a new startup. We started it in Rails 2.3.5. but now the project manager is talking about wanting to switch to Rails 3 because it's the hot new thing.

Whats the consensus if rails is ready for production environments that the customers will depend on? I haven't looked into it to much yet figured i'd start here.

Cheers, bp

2

brianp wrote:

Working on a project for a new startup. We started it in Rails 2.3.5. but now the project manager is talking about wanting to switch to Rails 3 because it's the hot new thing.

Whats the consensus if rails is ready for production environments that the customers will depend on? I haven't looked into it to much yet figured i'd start here.

I would say that step one would be to update your application (on a branch) to Rails 2.3.8. After doing that install the rails_xss gem (GitHub - rails/rails_xss: A plugin for rails 2.3 apps which switches the default to escape by default). Once that's complete then fix all deprecation warnings.

At this point, assuming everything is working correctly, I'd call this my "stable" version of the application. Now it's time to create a Rails 3.0 branch and start updating your application to use some of the new syntax and router capabilities. Once you have a working Rails 3.0 application that you're happy with then you will have a much better idea whether you're ready to trust your application running under Rails 3.0.

If you have the capability of doing so, roll out a beta of your site to your customer and ask them for feedback and bug reports. If all that goes smoothly then you might feel comfortable putting that into production. I'd still leave the beta status on the site until we have an official release of Rails 3.0 though.