Upgrading and Improving Legacy Ruby on Rails Applications

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 1 to 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