Since our team always works with technology edge whether it is rails or ruby, from last week we started moving to ruby 1.9.3 and rails 3.1.3. I am sharing our experiences we found during migrating our product to rails and ruby latest release.

Ruby-1.9.3 Upgrade

Compare to ruby 1.8.7 in ruby 1.9.3 there are lot of changes, newly introduced, and things taken away, some of them are here –

1) Load path not including the working directory

require_relative or require './file'

2)New Hash syntax – without hash-rockets(=>)

{ name: 'vishnu', age: '26'}

3)Character Encoding – more encoding support for other char-sets

cp950, cp951, UTF-16, and UTF-32 etc.

4)Array – to_s no longer joins elements, but returns and inspect style representation

choice method goes to sample method method nitems removed

5)Procs and Lambdas – proc {} creates a Proc object instead lambda

 proc {}.lambda?          #=> false
 lambda {}.lambda?        #=> true

source_location method gives file_name, line_number of proc

6)Time – Time standard library changed

Time.parse uses dd/mm/yyyy format instead of mm/dd/yyyy Time monday?, tuesday?, wednesday?, thursday?, friday?, saturday? sunday? Available to check a day

7)New in Standard Library1.9.3

json, to_json and JSON.load(data) method is available with objects minitest MiniTest and MiniTest::Spec prime – Prime number library

7.prime?          #=> true
6.prime?          #=> false

8)Removed from Standard Library 1.9.3

soap/wsdlDriver, date2, ftools,jcode(removed because now encoding support), parsedate, rubyunit

Rails-3.1.3 Upgrade

In order to upgrade to Rails 3.1.3 version with ruby 1.9.3 here are some points, those can help you –

1)To support special characters in your ruby code

Put {# –– coding: utf-8 ––} beginning of the file and configuration in application.rb for default encoding. config.encoding = “utf-8”

2)Capybara should upgrade to 1.1.2 version and cucumber with 1.1.2 version

regenerate cucumber environment with required options

bundle exec rails g cucumber:install --capybara –rspec

3)By default ActiveResource uses JSON format

To make default XML format specify format in initializers

ActiveResource::Base.format = ActiveResource::Formats::XmlFormat

4)To load all helpers in each controller/action specify config

config.action_controller.include_all_helpers = true   in application.rb
instead
helpers :all in application_controller.rb

5)To load test_helper.rb in all test specs, use

require './test/test_helper'
instead
require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../test_helper'

6)RJS template fix

RJS template and rjs code in controller is not supported, changed to .html.js template. For a quick fix you can use prototype-rails gem in Gemfile

gem 'prototype-rails'     #Gemfile

prototype-rails do not use prototype.js it provides helper methods to support rjs templates. later on you can migrate all .rjs to .js

7) Enable assets pipeline

To enable assets pipeline, an import feature of rails 3.1, you need to set application.rb with configurations-

config.assets.enabled = true
config.assets.initialize_on_precompile = false

and production.rb with configurations –

config.assets.compress = true
config.assets.compile = true
config.assets.digest = false
config.assets.js_compressor  = :uglifier

and gemfile should have a group :assets and should include saas-rails, coffee-rails, uglifier gems.

group :assets do
  gem 'sass-rails',   "~> 3.1.0"
  gem 'coffee-rails', "~> 3.1.0"
  gem 'uglifier'
end