After years on the bleeding edge, our motto is: "Use what works. Don't faff about with shiny new toys which don't benefit the customer." Ask any of our customers if they care that Freckle is on the simpler Rails 2.x. Or ask patio11's customers the same thing; he agrees with us on how awesome Rails 2.x is.

Also, Rails 2.x is NOT deprecated -- hence the spate of patches. Perhaps it will be, some day when Rails 4 is final, but given its popularity we'll all be extremely surprised if Rails 2.x doesn't live on as an independent and thriving fork.

RJS is not everyone's cup of tea but it's not defective. What ships default with Rails reflects all kinds of political & other realities and isn't necessarily what is "best."

.. and after years developing, maintaining and administering rails apps, my motto is "never let your app get out of date".

Rails 2.x is still functional, and still being updated, yes. It will very soon not be. And you've let such a gap open up that it's going to be a lot of work to catch up to where everyone else is.

As an example failure situation you are opening yourself up to: one day, your server crashes. You quickly order up a new one, but the DB version will be newer and it won't work with your current db gem. You'll try to install a new one but it won't work with your old, old version of rails. You'll hurriedly look into what it takes to upgrade and realise it will take days, and you don't know anything about the weird new stuff. You'll try to install the old version of the DB but it's not even in the repo and so you ask for a couple earlier versions of ubuntu but they don't support that anymore and you've been down 6 hours now and is that "benefiting the customer"?

Stay up to date.

(edited to make it clear I was not talking about live-coding on a production server)

How on earth do you get from "Rails 2.x will be deprecated sometime in the future, they say" to "your server is down 6 hours"? Do you think anyone reading this is coding (and updating libraries) live on the server? This is Rails, not PHP we're talking about.

I was talking about a catastrophic server failure, and the difficulty of timely recovering to an outdated software stack. Of course.

Anyway, just trying to counter your terrible advice to use 2.3.x.

If you don't have a system / recipe in place for rolling out new servers, having the newest framework is really not going to help you all that much.

That said, we run our current Rails 2.x products on shared servers (Rackspace). Their default set up works just fine.

You built up a horror scenario to prove your point, unfortunately it doesn't reflect reality / relies on a lot of assumptions about dev/ops incompetence that you didn't make clear.

Actually I've seen very similar things happen in practise. "Horror scenarios" happen all the time.

Look, you can sing the "works for me!" song all you like. The fact is, you are years out of date and this is very bad practise.

You will:

- have trouble even installing a compatible environment from scratch

- have trouble searching for information on issues you encounter

- have trouble hiring anyone good to work with your decidedly legacy code

With a fast moving platform like rails, you allow yourself to fall years behind the mainstream to your sorrow. It's like keeping backups. Yeah, you're fine without them, until the "horror scenario".

All the info I can find says that Rails team will stop releasing even security patches for Rails 2.3 as of Rails 4 release.

Do you have different info, am I wrong? I guess it's semantics on what "deprecated" means, but I'd be personally nervous using a product that is not even having security patches released by any maintainers.