Rails Will Ship With Leopard

While the Mac has long had a reputation for providing end users with a great out-of-the-box experience, it's noteworthy that it's steadily gaining an equally good rep among developers. This is especially true among the Ruby on Rails crowd -- Mac OS X is the preferred development platform for the Rails core group. Several counts I took at the recent RailsConf showed that Mac laptops outnumbered Wintel/Lintel ones by a nine-to-one ratio; some people have suggested that the ratio is larger. (In fact, after the Mac, the next most popular machine seemed to be the Nintendo DS.)

This announcement should boost its rep among developers even more: Rails will ship with both the client and server editions of OS X 10.5, a.k.a. "Leopard". Here's what the Riding Rails blog has to say:

The developer seed that was distributed today at WWDC contains Ruby 1.8.4 and Rails 1.1.2, but we fully expect to have Rails 1.2.x along with Mongrel, SQLite bindings, and lots of other Ruby goodies on the final gold master when it goes out in spring.