With the beta release of Rails 3 just around the corner, we’re planning a 2.0 release of Rspec, with an rspec-rails-2.0 gem for rails-3.0.

Late last week and through the weekend, Engine Yard, Relevance and Obtiva sponsored a meeting with Yehuda Katz, Carl Lerche, Chad Humphries, and me. The four of us laid out some groundwork and made some good progress toward what promises to be be a very friendly world for Rspec and Rails users and extenders.

Thanks to David Heinemeier Hansson and the rest of the Rails core team for embracing agnosticism without compromising convention over configuration.

I’ll follow up with details as things shape up, but here is a quick synopsis:

Rails users

Whether or not you use Rspec, you’ll see improvements in some of the built-in assertions, and other testing facilities that ship with Rails.

Rspec-rails users

If you do use Rspec, you’ll see a new rspec-rails plugin/gem that hooks into new features of rails-3 like the new rails generators. You’ll also see support for Merb-style request specs that wrap Rails’ integration tests.

Test framework authors

Rails’ testing APIs will be decoupled from the Test::Unit and Minitest runners. For authors of new testing frameworks, this means that you’ll be able to include a module in your framework’s objects instead of having to subclass TestCase. This will make it much easier to experiment with new ideas in the context of Rails, which clearly exposes those ideas to a wider audience than otherwise.