revjim.net

Rails 0.12.0 is out, and with "this release":http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/archives/2005/04/18/rails-0120-eager-associations-new-basefind-api-assertions-revisited-more-ajax/, comes many more benefits to drinking the koolaid.

First is the new "Eager Associations":http://ar.rubyonrails.com/classes/ActiveRecord/Associations/ClassMethods.html. Prior to this, accessing data from a related object would require N+1 queries — 1 to get the list of objects and another query for each object to get it's related objects. The only way around this was to inject your own "piggy backing" SQL to retrieve the information from the other table. This, however, drove over the object concept of the associated information, since it now appeared to simply be an additional data member to the original object. With Eager Associations, this is all handled correctly. N+1 queries are now replaced with JOINs when requested and real objects are returned where they should be. This is a vast improvement.

Secondly, there is the new and improved method of calling "ActiveRecord::Base.find":http://ar.rubyonrails.com/classes/ActiveRecord/Base.html#M000226 that makes remembering the syntax much easier than it was before and features nice integration with the Eager Associations mentioned above.

Couple this with more Ajax features, even more Assertions for testing, and the fact that this release is entirely backwards compatible with the last, and you've got not reason not to upgrade.