In a tweet today, David Heinemeier Hansson announced the coming end of support for Ruby 1.8.7 and older.
Rails 3.2.x is planned to be the last 3.x release branch. rails/master is now 4.0.0.beta and will only support Ruby 1.9.3+. Farewell 1.8.7! ‚ @dhh
If you are on Rails 3.0 or less, now is a really important time for you to start looking at upgrading your Rails environment to a newer version of Rails. Some of our clients have come to us on Rails 2.1 or older framework stacks to be upgraded, and while we can definitely do it, the older your underlying framework is, the more difficult the job of upgrading it to the newest version is.
This is especially true if you are still using the Rails 2.x versions. Upgrading to Rails 3.1 will not only make more of the modern tools and gems available for your site but will also result in a speed improvement. I wrote a blog post about speeding up Rails on the EngineYard blog if you would like to see the juicy details.
Aside from speed improvements and additional tools your site can take advantage of, there are also the important security issues. Rails has had numerous security updates over the years and if you are running on a particularly old version of Rails, your site, and the content on it, including any user data, could be at risk.
If you do not know what version of Rails you are on, or what the current state of your application is, we can help by performing a reInteractive Inspect Service on your code base. This provides you with a complete report about the application and what it does.
Let us know at enquiries@reinteractive.net if you would like to find out more information.
