During
mid-August the ROR 4.2 was announced for the first time. Now when it is
out it definitely looks to go a long way. Besides being the latest and
upgraded version, this time certain interesting changes have been
introduced in the Ruby on Rails application. Moreover, since it is the
recent version it is being widely applied to solve performance issues
across the various ROR versions.
Let’s explore the changes one by one:
Active Job and Action Mailer
Delayed
Job, Resque, Sidekiq, etc are queuing systems and on top of these lies
Active job, an adapter layer. This feature can be used to note down the
jobs and they will be running on the queues without any changes. This
happens due to the pre configured inline runner. It is a new framework
that has been added to Rails 4.2.
Besides
the Active Job, there is Active Mailer that is available with
#deliver_later method which can add an email that is to be used to the
queue. If this is done the model or controller cannot be bogged down at
all.
Adequate Record
This
version of ROR is also packed with another performance improving
feature, known as Adequate Record. This is a set of patches that enables
the Active Record to be faster twice. As far as Active Record is
concerned it transforms the relation objects to ARel ones. The ARel
objects stand for the SQL query AST. Lastly, the Adequate Record can
also convert the AST to a real SQL string that is further made to pass
to the database.
The
Adequate Record works by caching onto the SQL query pattern even when
it executes the Active Record calls. The cache, thus, helps in skipping
some part of the computation that is engaged in transforming the calls
into SQL queries.
Web Console
This
is a set of debugging tools used for the ROR application. In a default
Rails error page the interactive console is automatically launched.
Inspecting the stack trace as well as executing the Ruby code becomes
easy with this. Thus running the rail console proves to be quite handy.
At times, however, it is not easy to access or share the session with a
friend if it is configured with a remote desktop server. It is in this
regard that the web console can help the rails console to run. These are
found on the in the terminal right in the browser.
Support for Foreign Key
Initially
there was no support for the foreign key – neither while adding it nor
while removing it. But this time it is different. These keys are
immensely useful to ensure that the data stays consistently and
corrected even while the records are removed. This feature is supported
ROR out of the box.
Bootstrapping apps
For
enabling an automated setup code while bootstrapping an app, a new
feature has been launched, known as setup or bin. If you have already
written down the script then it is time to rename it. For almost all the
Rail applications, you need to run certain commands before they are
tried out. Even if the apps are almost empty they would require the
database to be setup prior to the booting. This is also the place where
you should include other codes required to run your applications as
well.
HTML Sanitizer
Finally,
ROR has replaced the HTML Sanitizer with a more robust framework that
has been built across Nokogiri and Loofah. The advantages of this new
sanitizer are that it has been built more powerfully and it is also more
secure.
Besides the mentioned changes there are other several changes as well, like, the following:
- JSONB datatype is supported by PostgreSQL adapter
- ActiveRecord::Base#validate! has been introduced. This leads to the display of RecordInvalid if the record is actually invalid.
- In order to define the validation on the association a :required has been added to the singular associations.
- #valid? Has found a new alias in #validate
Owing
to such changes and more, the ROR 4.2 is being considered as an
application that will help I further improvements. You can get in touch
with a Ruby on Rails development company, who can help you develop web apps that are stable, scalable and secure.
We provide ror development services. If you would like to hire Certified Rails Programmers for your development needs, please contact us at Mindfire Soltuions.
