I was supposed to be at RailsConf this year covering the event for InfoQ, but I am not there. Sometimes higher priorities overtake the things we would like to do and well, I am home. 
One of the announcements I thought might be coming at the event was the release of Ruby on Rails 2.1 and sure enough, it was released. The details are covered on the Riding Rails blog:
Rails 2.1 is now available for general consumption with all the features and fixes we?ve been putting in over the last six months since 2.0. This has been a huge effort by a very wide range of contributors helping to make it happen.
Over the past six months, we?ve had 1,400 contributors creating patches and vetting them. This has resulted in 1,600+ patches. A truly staggering number. And lots of that has made it into this release.
New features
The new major features are:
- Time zones (by Geoff Buesing): Tutorial | Introdction | Railscast
- Dirty tracking: Introduction (partial updates) | Railscast
- Gem Dependencies: Introduction | Railscast
- Named scope (by Nick Kallen): Introduction | Railscast
- UTC-based migrations: Introduction | Railscast
- Better caching: Introduction
Thanks to Ryan Daigle for the feature introductions and Ryan Bates for the Railscasts. It makes writing the release notes so much easier :).
As always, you can install with:
gem install rails…or you can use the Git tag for 2.1.0.
None of these features actually stand out as the killer feature for this release but is instead a bunch of steady, solid improvements. Installing the update went without a hitch and my applications on my development system all ran without issue.
Notice the Railscast that accompanies the bulleted points above, they make a nice touch.