XML News from Sunday, December 9, 2007

David Heinemeier Hannsen has released Rails 2.0, a web development framework written in Ruby, Version 2.0 implements a much cleaner, far more RESTful design including sane URLs and HTTP Basic Authentication. Other new features include JSON and Atom support, CSRF protection, and broader exception handling.

I'll have to play with this some before I'm sure if it's really right, but it certainly feels more correct than 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2. Of course, even if Rails has finally gotten HTTP and REST right, it's still struggling with the wrong data store. Relational databases just don't fit web sites all that well. In fact, probably 80% of Rails and similar frameworks is dedicated to working around the hassle of shredding your pages into tables and then putting them back together again. If instead you build a web site on top of a native XML database such as eXist, there's just a lot less work to do in the first place.