The future of Spree OSS and whats new in Spree 3.3

tony — Tue, 29 Aug 2017 05:36:14 +0000

The story so far Ever since its advent in 2007, Spree – originally developed by Sean Schofield, is the most popular open source Ruby On Rails E-commerce Software spanning over 17,703 commits, 725 contributes and 208 releases. Spree was acquired by First Data in the late 2015 and since then, there has been fair amount of speculation around Spree remaining as an opensource project and it’s long term future as outlined here in this blog post. As it turned out Spree didn’t die off, but revived under a new core team. After the acquisition announcement developers from Spark Solutions and Vinsol volunteered to keep spree alive and has been doing a fantastic job, putting shoulders to the wheel by taking Spree from version 3.0.4 to the current Spree 3.3

Whats new in Spree 3.3

On August 22, 2017, Spree released version 3.3 and is packed with the following major features.

Rails 5.1 support

Spree 3.3 is Rails 5.1 compatible whereas Spree 3.2 runs on Rails version 5.0. Which means managing JavaScript dependencies from NPM via `Yarn`, ability to use direct & resolved routes, parameterized mailers and many more goodies `Rails 5.1` has to offer

Ruby 2.4 support

Spree now works with Ruby versions `2.2 (>= 2.2.7)` , 2.2 (>= 2.2.7) , 2.2 (>= 2.2.7) , 2.3.x and the latest 2.4.x. So Ruby 2.4x ? Yay! that’s Faster Hashes, Unified Integers, and Better Rounding for you right out of the box

Segment tracker integration

Spree 3.3 is bundled with segment.com Tracker system which enables you to connect your store with over 200 analytics engines, CRMs, live chats, remarketing platforms and much more without any additional development. If that’s not cool enough for you stay tuned for next releases for more third party tracker and analytics integrations.

Bug fixes and performance enhancements

– Unique indexes and uniqueness validation on number fields for important models – Multiple regular & unique indexes that were missing have been added to improve data consistency and performance – Optimized Shipments and Inventory Units. – Better Store Credits management in customer Frontend and Admin Panel

Whats next?

Spree development has been slowly gaining traction recently. The future roadmap for spree development can be found here. But still, it is fair to say that more focus and a unified effort is necessary for the long term survival of Spree. Let’s join the folks at Spark solutions and Vinsol and start contributing to Spree OSS project]]>