Technology tire kicking: trying Rails 4.0 beta

As I mentioned in my last blog article I am (mostly) shutting down my consulting business in order to have time for work on writing projects and to try to develop three business ideas. All three involve web apps/services and I want to use Clojure for two of them and Rails for the third.

Rails 4 should be released early in 2013 but I thought I would get a leg up and start experimenting with Rails 4 now. Fairly easy to set up and try:

git clone https://github.com/rails/rails.git
cd rails
gem install sprockets
rake build ; rake install

And then version 4 beta is installed:

✗ rails -v
Rails 4.0.0.beta
✗ rails new testapp -d postgresql

I had to comment out the assets group in the generated Gemfile before bundle install but otherwise everything worked fine.