My favourite Ruby web application framework Ramaze has been updated, and in a major way. As of the 2009.05 gem release Ramaze is built on top of sub-project Innate – a lean mean core that in turn builds on top of Rack. Pistos explains the major changes well in his blog post. For me, although I'm yet to properly get to grips with the new code, the most promising things to look forward to are:

• A fresh start with a lot of accumulated cruft thrown out, resulting in cleaner, more straightforward code for Ramaze itself. I end up reading the Ramaze code a lot (it's very accessible and empowering) so this makes it even easier to delve into the internals and figure out what's what.
• Rack middleware is front and centre, making it easy to chain HTTP processing components into your request handling flow – like Java servlet filters. Not required very often, but a godsend when it is.
• A much tidier sessions implementation, with lazy initialisation.
• A rethought render helper that brings a bit more sanity to the many ways to bring in view fragments.
• Layout support is more of a core concern, with more facilities to deal with layouts sensibly.
• Built-in support for serving different content representations from the same controller.
• An interesting new codebase for me to poke my nose into 🙂 

Now if only I can find time to get my Ramaze CRUD framework going in this new world order, then package it up to share with the rest of the world. One day!