Yesterday was Thanksgiving holiday for US-based developers – but it certainly hasn’t looked like a holiday week in edge Rails. Things are moving fast, with some major changes afoot for version 2.3 of Rails.
The underpinnings of script/server have been simplified and rewritten somewhat. The explicit list of supported servers that used to be in script/server is gone. Instead, Rails now depends on the installation of Rack, and script/server goes through this – which means that Rails supports any server that Rack does.
Routing sees a couple of big changes this week. The formatted_ route helpers are gone, in favor just passing in :format as an option. This cuts down the route generation process by 50% for any resource – and can save a substantial amount of memory (up to 100MB on large applications, according to the Lighthouse ticket ) If your code uses the formatted_ helpers, it will still work for the time being – but that behavior is deprecated and your application will be more efficient if you rewrite those routes using the new standard. Another big change is that Rails now supports multiple routing files, not just routes.rb. You can use RouteSet#add_configuration_file to bring in more routes at any time – without clearing the currently-loaded routes. commit commit
The second routing change enables better support for Rails Engines: routing files in engines are automatically loaded and reloaded now (as are those in other plugins). Engines are getting some love other than routing. If your plugin has an app folder, then app/[models|controllers|helpers] will automatically be added to the Rails load path. There’s active discussion of just how this should work, and how much to pick up from the current engines plugins, so it’s likely we haven’t seen the last commits in this area. Engines also support adding view paths now. commit commit commit commit
If you’re a fan of the Thoughtbot Quiet Backtrace plugin, which allows you to selectively remove lines from Test::Unit backtraces, you’ll be happy to find ActiveSupport::BacktraceCleaner and Rails::BacktraceCleaner in core. This supports both filters (to perform regex-based substitutions on backtrace lines) and silencers (to remove backtrace lines entirely). Rails automatically adds silencers to get rid of the most common noise in a new application, and builds a config/backtrace_silencers.rb file to hold your own additions. commit
A variety of commits continue the drive towards Ruby 1.9 and minitest compatibility. This should ensure that Rails 2.3 is ready to handle the latest Ruby underpinnings when it’s released. Those on the bleeding edge at the moment need to beware, though: one of the changes in edge Rails depends on a ruby-core patch that hasn’t yet been applied there. You’ll also (temporarily) need to pick up Jeremy Kemper’s fork of Mocha for MiniTest compatability as required by this commit .
Jeremy Kemper and Josh Peek have been doing a ton of work on making sure that bits of Rails (and its dependencies) are only brought into memory when they’re actually needed. Check out the commits from November 23 for a bunch of lazy-loading changes. The core frameworks – Active Support, Active Record, Action Controller, Action Mailer and Action View – are now using autoload to lazy-load their individual classes. This work should help keep the memory footprint down and improve overall Rails performance. commit commit commit commit commit
You can specify using the new preload_frameworks option whether the core libraries should be autoloaded at startup. This defaults to false so that Rails autoloads itself piece-by-piece, but there are some circumstances where you still need to bring in everything at once – Passenger and JRuby both want to see all of Rails loaded together. commit
Asset hosts get more flexible in edge Rails with the ability to declare an asset host as a specific object that responds to a call. DHH has supplied a sample project, asset-hosting-with-minimum-ssl , that demonstrates one good use for this functionality. commit
You can now configure the location of the helpers folder for a Rails application by setting ActionController::Base.helpers_dir. This will be a boon in some unusual circumstances – the original use case is for building a Rails application that encourages extension via plugin rather than by altering the application itself. commit
Token generation for CSRF protection has been simplified; now Rails uses a simple random string generated by ActiveSupport::SecureRandom rather than mucking around with session IDs. As a result, the :digest and :secret options to protect_from_forgery are deprecated and have no effect on edge. commit
While we’re on the subject of secrets, some people will find novel uses for ActiveSupport::MessageEncryptor, which provides a simple way to encrypt information for storage in an untrusted location (like cookies). commit
Active Support’s from_xml no longer depends on XmlSimple. Instead, Rails now includes its own XmlMini implementation, with just the functionality that it requires. This lets Rails dispense with the bundled copy of XmlSimple that it’s been carting around. commit commit
As you probably recall, last week’s improvements included the renaming of application.rb to application_controller.rb. This week there’s a new rake task, rake rails:update:application_controller to do this automatically for you – and it will be run as part of the normal rake rails:update process. commit
Good news if you’re using ActiveSupport::OrderedHash: it now implements each_key and each_value. commit
One more bit of core Rails is open to I18n: the units used by number_to_human_size. If you’re maintaining a translation file, you need to add the storage_units: [Bytes, KB, MB, GB, TB] to your translations. commit
Support for Rails components – which were famously called “a shining example of what happens when eagerness overtakes prudence” in Agile Web Development With Rails – is finally gone. If a couple of years of warning about this deprecation wasn’t enough for you, then it’s time to find an alternate solution at last. commit
Various files in /public that deal with CGI and FCGI dispatching are no longer generated in every Rails application by default (you can still get them if you need them by adding --with-dispatches when you run the rails command, or add them later with rake rails:generate_dispatchers). commit commit
Just a reminder: I’m not providing pointers to every single commit here, just trying to highlight things. This week’s edge changes actually included 136 commits from a wide variety of contributors.