Rails 3 Beta is Out

The Rails 3 beta has been officially announced and that means its time to start tinkering. Some very important things I was looking forward to coming out of the merb / rails merge were the massive decoupling of many of the core components. One nice example of the widespread decoupling that has occurred is with the ActiveModel library which has been pulled apart to accommodate a non-RDBMS approach (such as MongoDB). However, the best example of this is the extensions API which has moved the core components (ActiveRecord, ActionMailer, etc.) to instead be extensions. This will allow for the replacement of parts or whole areas of the core; we will see, with rails 3, the birth of much more extreme examples of a “rails” apps and that, i think, is what has everyone excited.