Description:

Over the past year, Rails has gradually (and sometimes quietly) introduced some dramatic new changes. The most obvious of these is the Merb merger, but one of the most important steps on the path to Rails 3.0 was the introduction of Rack support. The effects of that change are wide-ranging, and are often surprising — and include the possibility for new architectures that were impractical or impossible before. Specifically, it is now feasible to build a complex Rails application that can still respond extremely quickly and directly to a specific set of requests, such as those an AJAX service might experience.