Rails 2.3.5 was released over the weekend which provides several bug-fixes and one security fix. It should be fully compatible with all prior 2.3.x releases and can be easily upgraded to with “gem update rails”. The most interesting bits can be summarized in three points.

Improved compatibility with Ruby 1.9

There were a few small bugs preventing full compatibility with Ruby 1.9. However, we wouldn’t be surprised you were already running Rails 2.3.X successfully before these bugs were fixed (they were small).

RailsXss plugin availability

As you may have heard, in Rails 3 we are now automatically escaping all string content in erb (where as before you needed to use “h()” to escape). If you want to have this functionality today you can install Koz’s RailsXss plugin in Rails 2.3.5.

Fixes for the Nokogiri backend for XmlMini

With Rails 2.3 we were given the ability to switch out the default XML parser from REXML to other faster parsers like Nokogiri. There were a few issues with using Nokogiri which are now resolved, so if your application is parsing lots of xml you may want to switch to this faster XML parser.

And that’s the gist of it

Feel free to browse through the commit history if you’d like to see what else has been fixed (but it’s mostly small stuff).