This release is mostly about polishing the Rails by closing holes, deficiencies, and subtle extensions to existing features. The long-awaited Directions and generator upgrade have been postponed to the next release. The highlights of this release is:

• Rewritten reloading: Working in development with models and controllers reloading on every request now resembles “the real thing” a lot more by actually removing the model classes before reloading them. This fixes a bunch of subtle bugs and makes it possible to remove a method and see it reflected without restarting the application.

• Create and update collections: Through calls like text_field "student[]", "last_name", it’s now much easier to get input tags like input name="student[123][last_name]"..., which together with the fact that Base#create, Base#update, Base#destroy, Base#delete, AssociationCollection#build, and AssociationCollection#create now all accept arrays enables handling of many records at once.

• Stopping after render/redirect: Any before_filter can now terminate the chain by calling render or redirect and the pattern of redirect-and-return now works again. The first call to either render or redirect wins as well and subsequent calls are ignored.

That’s just three of the 37 changes, fixes, and additions available in Rails 0.9.5. You can read the full story in the changelogs for Active Record, Action Pack, and Rails.

This release shouldn’t require any changes to your application if you’re coming from Rails 0.9.4 unless you were relying on const_missing to load non-AR/AO/AC classes. In that case, you’ll have to start being explicit with require_dependency for the reloading to be triggered.