When will you upgrade your app to Rails 3?

Question

Now that the Rails 3 beta is here, let's take a little straw poll.

Please tell us briefly what your application does and when you will upgrade it to Rails 3. Or, if you're not planning on upgrading any time soon, tell us what's stopping you.

Answer 1

I'm not planning to. I'm sure I'm in a very small minority, but my big application is still running 1.2.6. Each time I consider making the effort to upgrade it seems Rails changes again.

It does what I want it to do, makes good money, and despite feeling more and more left out in the cold I just don't have a sufficiently compelling reason to update it.

Answer 2

I've been keeping my apps on the edge of 2.3, but since there's a lot of fundamental changes to Rails in 3, I'll probably install the beta, work on converting them over and hope to be ready by the time it's released as stable.

I'm also glad there's a lot of lead time before RailsConf so I can really get familiar with the new features of Rails 3 and won't feel lost/overwhelmed there.

Answer 3

I'll answer my own question.

I'm not sure how many betas there are going to be for Rails 3, but I'm going to hold off converting my blog application until the next beta or the final release. I think it's going to be quite a time-consuming process because I have a lot of view helpers that build markup, a lot of named scopes and some quite complicated routing.

I want to add page caching first before tackling Rails 3!

Answer 4

Honestly? When developers wake up and start work on Rails 3/Ruby 1.9 in their gems and plugins. They know it's been coming for several months now, and most haven't even bothered to upgrade. One in particular that I'd like to point out is authlogic, one of the most used authentication plugins out there. It still doesn't work for Rails 3.

Whoops!

Answer 5

All my Rails apps are currently running under Rails 2.3.5 and every app has a LOC of 80% or greater. This has always been a key requirement for every product I create for myself or I manage at work.

Usually, upgrading to a minor/bugfix release is just a matter of a few minutes. Change GEM version, upgrade requirements, run tests, fix issues and commit.

Rails 3.0 is a major rewrite and the biggest problem is represented by plugin compatibility. Plugins are not under my direct control. This is the same reason why I had hard time trying to upgrade to Ruby 1.9.1.

However, I'm already playing with Rails 3. I want to learn the most important changes of Rails 3 as soon as possible in order to start moving the existing apps to the right directions. Moreover, as a plugin author, it's important to me to start working with Rails 3 in order to make my plugins compatible.

Yesterday I start with my most simple app. Well, at least this is what I was used to think about it. Anyway, it is the app with the lower number of external dependencies (less than 3 Gems) and it took about 1 hour to upgrade and 3 hour to figure out why Rails was failing to load my routes. It turned out, the Rails Metal component was fighting with the new Rails 3 stack.

There are some minor issues I have to figure out, but I can say I successfully migrated my first app to Rails 3.

I'm planning to migrate all my Rails apps to Rails 3 as soon as possible, once Rails 3 stable will be available. Or at least, as soon as I can figure out whether the dependencies actually work with Rails 3. Fortunately, a project has been started at http://railsplugins.org/ with the intent of listing all compatible/incompatible Rails plugins.

My remote environment is already compatible with Rails 3, I'm using Passenger with Ruby Enterprise Edition (1.8.7). The only blocking issue are plugins.

I guess it would take at least one month before having the major part of my Rails app ready for Rails 3 thought I won't probably start the upgrade until Rails 3 stable is out or I really need the new version for some blocking feature (ex. subdomain-based routing).

Answer 6

After trying out the beta and it not wanting to work with any commands, I have decided to wait until a new beta.

The ticket has already been opened for the issue.

Answer 7

I'm not going to upgrade any apps to rails 3.

However, I just decided that all new projects will be rails3 going forward. The lack of plugin support isn't a big issue as I see it as an opportunity to decouple my apps from plugins so that I can swap them in and out as I please later.

I also suspect that the big plugins will upgrade very quickly as they won't want to be left in the dust.

Keep track of plugin status here.

Answer 8

I don't think I'll upgrade any of my applications. It would be a large amount of work compared to what I'd gain from it. Also in some cases the plugins/gems I used in my app are not compatible with Rails 3 so upgrading would be impossible or would require to fork the gems... too time consuming.

If I had to update, I'd probably wait a bit more for all the gems/plugins to be updated to Rails 3. Of course any new application I'll develop will be done using Rails 3.