Probably the most important change in the next version of Ruby on Rails, 1.2, will be its embracing of the REST style of developing web applications. I started learning about Rails and REST at the same time and quickly got excited about both of them so in my opinion is a great thing that we can now get the benefits of both at the same time.

Just as a quick summary:

• REST is about using the full power of HTTP, which is a lot more that most of us thought. URLs should point to resources and the HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) should be used with a meaning.
• Ruby on Rails is a web development framework developed with the Ruby language. It comes with its own development environment and provides libraries for the whole stack from the frontend to the database backend. It's motto is to use convention over configuration and I can tell you that it really pays of.