Upgrading Legacy Rails Applications to Rails 3

Smart developers have been using Ruby on Rails to rapidly build web applications for over 5 years now. Cutting-edge projects have aged into old, moldy, legacy apps. Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9 offer performance improvements and new features that are guaranteed to take the squeak out of that old wheel and grease the tracks of new development. We’re going to walk through upgrading real projects and then work through some stumbling blocks taken from the audience.

We’re going to specifically talk about:

• The upgrade path from Rails 2 to Rails 3
• The rails_upgrade gem
• Rooting out bugs caused by moving from Ruby 1.8 to Ruby 1.9
• Updating views to work with Rails 3’s new escaping rules
• Refactoring patterns to break large controllers into small, RESTful controllers
• Safely updating plugins
• Working with Bundler to move requirements out into a Gemfile

NOTE: We’re going to walk through migrating a legacy Rails application to Rails 3.1, but in order to solve the hard problems attendees are going through, I’d like to attack real issues. If you are attending this tutorial, feel free to send examples of issues you are having ahead of time to crnixon at crnixon dot com. Please put [Rails3] in the subject line.

Depending on the time we have and the interest, we’ll pull examples from the audience and have a workshop on those problems. Attendees should bring their problem applications and have a way to do remote screen sharing. A VNC server will do if you are running Linux or Windows; OS X users can use built-in screen sharing.