Rails 1.1 is finally out, DHH announced it yesterday.

There are a lot of great features in this release and the most expected is certainly RJS. Basically, a Javascript generator that lets the programmer express Javascript statements in Ruby from the server-side. A great example of DSL.

This release also feature bugfixes and ActiveRecord improvements such as polymorphic associations. Go read this and this to have an overview of the main features.

Actually, the more I use Rails the more I think it looks like the framework I always wanted to write… in Common Lisp. When I first came to serious web development (just a few years ago) I was astonished to see the state of the technology in that field and especially the state of big frameworks — that didn’t solve anything but made web development such a pain. Having a strong Lisp culture, I was quite sure a better way existed and that it would come from dynamic environments and through code generation.

I’m glad to see that I was right but I didn’t had the patience and the guts to make it happen in the Common Lisp universe. They made it and it’s great. Congrats to the team!