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!

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

After realising that I probably spend more time in Zend Framework and Doctrine getting code to work (fixing framework bugs, annoying language workarounds, and just plain pain), than actually coding features I decided that it s finally time to give RoR a go. Especially as RoR3 is now out with a bunch of documentation.

5 hours through and it s looking really promising. 1 hour of it was debugging though, some documentation on a plugin was not up to speed, but alas I m there.

It s interesting, and does seem to be in a better direction. More time to code on features, and less time coding to debug.

So the app I m converting is my premium CMS that is deployed in over 20 websites now, and powers my own balupton.com - so will be interesting, as the CMS is already a complete featured cms.