We’ve released Ruby on Rails 2.3.6: six months of bug fixes, a handful of new features, and a strong bridge to Rails 3.

We deprecated some obscure and ancient features in Rails 2.3.6 so we could cut them entirely from Rails 3. If your app runs on Rails 2.3.6 without deprecation warnings, you’re in good shape for a smooth sail onward.

This slow-cooked dish is brought to you some 87 committers from our all-volunteer kitchen.

Now, let’s open the goodie bag!

Action Pack

• Upgrade Rack from 1.0.1 to 1.1.0.
• XSS prevention: update to match Rails 3 and move to the official plugin at http://github.com/rails/rails_xss.
• Cookies: convenient cookie jar add-ons to set permanent or signed cookies, or both at once: cookies.permanent.signed[:remember_me] = current_user.id. Read more.
• Flash: promote alert and notice, the most common flash keys in many apps, to self.alert = '...' and self.notice = '...'. Add redirect_to url, :alert => '...' and :notice => '...'. Read more.
• i18n: localize the label helper.

Active Record

• Namespacing: support optional table name prefixes on modules by defining self.table_name_prefix. Read more.
• Destroy uses optimistic locking.
• Counter cache: use Post.reset_counters(1234, :comments) to count the number of comments for post 1234 and reset its comments_count cache.
• PostgreSQL: always use standard-conforming strings, if supported.
• MySQL: add index length support. Read more.
• MySQL: add_ and change_column support column positioning using :first => true and :after => :other_column.

Active Support

• Upgrade i18n from 1.3.3 to 1.3.7.
• Upgrade TZInfo from 0.3.12 to 0.3.16.
• Multibyte: speed up string verification and cleaning.
• JSON: use YAJL for JSON decoding, if available. gem install yajl-ruby
• Testing: add assert_blank and assert_present. Read more.
• Core: backport Object#singleton_class from Ruby 1.8.8, deprecating our Object#metaclass.
• Core: add Object#presence that returns the object if it’s #present? otherwise returns nil. Example: region = params[:state].presence || params[:country].presence || 'US'
• Core: add Enumerable#exclude? to match include?.
• Core: rename Array#rand to Array#random_element to avoid collision with Kernel#rand.
• Core: rename Date# and Time#last_(month|year) to #prev_(month|year) for Ruby 1.9 forward compatibility.

Active Resource

• JSON: set ActiveResource::Base.include_root_in_json = true to serialize as a hash of model name → attributes instead of a bare attributes hash. Defaults to false.

Action Mailer

• Upgrade TMail from 1.2.3 to 1.2.7.

Railties

• Silence RubyGems 1.3.6 deprecation warnings.

Peruse the commit log for the full story.