Expected features and enhancements of Rails 5

"Rails right from its inception, has received overnight popularity and love from the industry and the developers as well. With the in-built integration with Ruby, the framework is simply awesome; in fact, we can say it’s a duo i.e. language-framework concept and first in its kind on the earth. Ruby on Rails, as a web application framework, is widely appreciated for the components that it highlights. The model view controller structure not just persuades the use of web standards, but also focuses on the use of other popular software engineering patterns and paradigms – be it the Active Record Pattern or Convention over Configuration. And now, Rails Core Team has taken a further step in fortifying the cross-platform web application framework by giving a preview into the Rails 5. Here, we’re listing out some expected features and enhancements of Rails 5 (although, the new version will entail Ruby 2.2.). Industry is anxiously waiting for the next version of Rails i.e. Rails 5 because there are lots of hopes and expectations associated with the rails 5. Let's see few of our assumptions and expectations from Rail”.

Integration of Rails API: The new version is expected to amalgamate rails API into its core configuration, hence enabling the use of Rails as an easy-to-use JSON API. This will also simplify the process of creating an API for any JavaScript application. This will simply eliminate the use of Heavy JS APIs for their application instead railAPI will serve the purpose in an optimized manner. Web projects that take help from emberJS, BackboneJS etc for RESTFUL design can get a relief by the introduction of rail API and it will take all the necessary processes into consideration for a successful API call. However, users would be required to have Ruby 2.2.1 or above before they move to Rails 5.

Turbolinks 3: In the world of smart web browsers; it is really difficult to deal with multiple constraints that arise due to excessive use and production of wide variety of devices that are having no proper hardware specification or potential. Along with that, these devices used to take the help of mobile networks for the browsing purpose i.e. 2G, 3G or even GPRS. So, it is really a challenge to make each and every web app page load faster by reducing its size and making it dynamic and asynchronous. For this purpose, the framework rolls in Turbolinks 3 to resolve the trepidation of sluggish web applications. The addition is anticipated to help users hold onto most of their web pages and selectively update certain sections through partials. While this shares similarity with SPA in a way, the feature aims at eliminating the hassle of slow web page reloads. In return it will not only improve the overall user experience but also the look and feel of the web app will move to a next level.

Action Cable: The highly anticipated Action Cable should be making its way to Rails 5 – hence, developers who felt a dearth of WebSocket support can definitely look forward to this one! Action Cable is a part of Rails 5 (as publicly announced by Rails), hence now there is no more worry for multiple instance applications especially while dealing with live web communication. Suppose you are going to add a live chat application to your Rails app; then this can be well handled by Action Cable which is simply can be integrated to client side JS and back-end Ruby program. Ruby on Rails development, for certain, provides all the tools that a developer would require in order to design a great application. However, this new feature will bring forth an incredible performance boost among the community. It will make the application much more effective without any need to integrate websocket!

Rake Tasks: Several things are likely to go simpler, including the Rake Tasks. The upgrade will enable users to perform all Rake tasks using just Rails. Although the new facility is analogous to the previous versions of Rails, it is expected to ease the process of task optimization for many developers out there. It is highly effective when we need a cron to run in a periodic manner for our web application. In this process, your application will be loaded with up-to-date database data to se5rve the users in a more effective way. rake db:reset and rake db:seed are the core of this concept. These two components makes the cron proces much hasslefree than before. With reset; the db will reset and with seed the db will be modified with the latest data.In previous versions of Rake, terming was restricted to only alphanumeric characters – beginning with an underscore and so on. The new version, however, aims at roping in the prospect of entitling partials using any character. Rails 5 will let users use any character post the underscore. The Rails team has also taken off its helper methods like div_for & content_tag_for and has transferred them to a separate part ‘record_tag_helper.’

Action Pack: Just like MVC architecture, Rails has some inbuilt similar concept through its Action Pack. Action Pack consists of two major parts i.e. Action View and Action Controller. It is quite similar to that of View and Controller of MVC. Now, every request of Rails will be handled by Action pack. The Action Pack then divides it into part segments i.e. Action Controller and Action View. Action Controller instructs the Action View which data to display and which to hide. By this process, the core logic or analysis is performed by the Action Pack and the entire event is handled smoothly with Action Controller and Action View. Developers may look forward to the new Action Pack, which will basically focus on generating accurate routing information. And, this will come straight from the Rails backend. It includes the working concept of Action View and Action Controller.

Render from Anywhere: The route of render_anywhere also gets a tweak. Earlier, users would have to use render_anywhere in order to deliver any views outside of controller. The new Rails 5 takes that away and lets users render their views from anywhere. Moreover, users will be able to benefit from the newly added ‘assigns’ function as well. That will allow users to pass instance variables to templates.

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