a day in the pit my view from inside

What’s New in Rails 3 & What I’m Excited About

Rails 3.1.0 was released on 8/31/2011, and as such marks a great day for the Rails community. For a while Rails felt stagnant (think 2.3.11 to 3.0.1RC) and so this is something I've been looking forward to. As I've been using Rails 3 for over a year now, and I've been following along in the change sets, I wanted to point out some of the features I think are really going to be game changers.

Sprockets, and the Asset Pipeline

Previously done through third party libraries, the Asset Pipeline is a built-in framework for managing your assets and writing these assets in other, some say more friendly languages, like CoffeeScript for JavaScript and Sass for CSS  style sheets. It's a very large change to Rails because it introduces a new mix of options for how you can write your JS/CSS and it moves the serving of these components to the Rack middle-ware. Your asset resources now can be pre-processed, minified, and compressed in one swoop. This process is done by Sprockets. I won't go into any further detail but you should know this is worth reading up on, so go check out the Asset Pipeline introduction by the RoR team. (You can disable this feature if you don't want to use it. So don't freak out!)

Streaming

Although it requires Ruby 1.9x to run, HTTP streaming has finally been added. Part of the confusion I often hear about Rails is why this feature was not there from day one. To be honest, I'm not sure but my hunch is that it didn't make sense in a prototyping stage to have to stream content. Further, it's very very error prone compared to building your response and then shipping it over (i.e. if computational errors occur mid stream you're dead in the water and the page will never finish loading). Further, Ajax helped mitigate this need by loading a light HTML shell and then using asynchronous calls to fetch your users' data. At any rate, I'm very excited for this feature because the last two years of PHP coding has had me used to buffering output and I really do see the value in being able to use streaming to show progress without making lots of asynchronous calls.

JSON

ActiveResource now defaults responses to JSON, as opposed to XML.

jQuery

Is now the default JavaScript library bundled with Rails 3. Further, RJS has been factored out as a gem.

Basic Authentication

Rails 3 comes with a quick and easy way of doing Basic Authentication (Username/Password) in your Controllers. Read up on Base.http_basic_authenticate_with - Check out the example here

Pluralize Names for Models

Yup! You can now set, on specific models, whether you want them pluralized or not. From within your controller class you'd set: self.pluralize_table_names = false

BCrypt Passwords

You now have a model attribute has_secure_password that will take care of password hashing/encryption.