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Rails 4.2.0 beta1: Active Job, Deliver Later, Adequate Record, Web Console

by jyunderwood on 8/20/14, 2:44 AM with 132 comments

• by r-s on 8/20/14, 3:45 AM

  Rails gets a bit of negative press these days, but its nice to see the framework moving forward. Rails is still a great choice for a large percent of web apps. There is a fairly big community even in smaller cities, a very complete framework, a large ecosystem of gems, open source and still improving.

• by j4pe on 8/20/14, 5:13 AM

  I've been working on a Django project for the last few months. In past gigs I've used Drupal, and even talked community with one of Drupal's corporate overlords at Acquia. I enjoy working with Ember and follow its releases. But I've never grinned and cheered for new features the way I do with Rails.

  It took me a long time to realize that Rails' greatness isn't due to magical omakase magic - it's the community DHH (and the core team) have built over the years, and the strong product focus they've applied. Really impressive. Did Torvalds work like this? Has anyone has studied or written about organizational behavior in the open-source community?

• by aaronbrethorst on 8/20/14, 3:19 AM

      Support for real foreign keys!
      addforeignkey/removeforeignkey are now
      available in migrations.
  

  Awesome! Despite the naysayers, I still feel incredibly productive in Rails, and am so happy it continues to improve.

• by resca79 on 8/20/14, 12:54 PM

  Here a rails committer.

  Rails is 10 years old and it has definitely changed the web development. But the unnecessary controversy always seem the same of its first year.

  While in the last 10 years, many people talking Rails does not scale and ruby is slow, for many companies rails was and is a great "tool" to delivery great web apps.

  Thanks Rails

• by neya on 8/20/14, 5:55 AM

  There was a time when I used to advocate my fellow folks here at HN (and possibly even reddit) to go for a framework built on faster languages like GoLang or Scala or even using platforms like Node.js and avoid slower ones like Rails. Now, it's time for me to apologize to the community for giving you wrong advice [1]. Turns out I could never have been more wrong.

  I wish I could write a long post describing each of the WHY's, but I'll be more succinct, this time:

  1)If you can throw money at something at something and scale, then you're as good as gold. Rails allows you to do this. Oh, and supportive statements from Pinterest guys on the same topic - [2].

  2) The speed of a language has nothing to do with the success of your business. NOTHING. You can go with the world's slowest language and still be successful. Best example of this is Basecamp itself.

  As a matter of fact, even many of the popular sites (heck, even popular porn sites) still run on PHP (PHP was one of the slowest from the frameworks speed comparison conducted by Techempower - [3]).

  3) The actual thing you want to be able to do is quickly iterate on your product and constantly have it evolve. This is only possible if you have a complete framework that doesn't force you to re-invent the wheel. For example, when I wrote a framework by myself in GoLang, Scala, I found myself focusing too much on basic stuff like authentication, instead of focusing on the features that are needed for the actual product.

  4) (P.S this is my personal opinion) I've tried all major frameworks out there and I've come back to Rails again. Why? Because its philosophy resonates with me (yes, now it does). For me, the three most important elements for a successful product are - Speed, Reliability, Consistency. Rails provides me with all these three. (And please try Puma, it's pretty impressive!).

  As for me, the ability to seamlessly integrate SASS, Compass and HAML (which help me divide my product development time multiple folds) makes Rails a clear winner for me. And now Active Job, Deliver Later, Adequate Record, Web Console now make Rails much more complete than ever. (Thank you DHH!)

  In the last 6 months, I've written 4 complete products for 4 different people (one of them, being mine) that is well tested and works perfectly as intended. Compare this to something like last year where I spent 2-3 months writing just a single software product (for myself) while I was trying to use GoLang (<- or insert another faster language here) (because I also had to take care of all the other things like Authentication, etc). The point is, ultimately you want to run a successful business. And if you're worried if the slowness of your language will hinder it's growth, then nope. That will not happen. I hope this helps someone.

  Cheers.

  [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=neya&next=6993616

  [2] http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/4/15/scaling-pinterest-...

  [3] http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=i7...

• by cpursley on 8/20/14, 2:49 PM

  Truly impressive. I'd also like to see the Rails team focus on Rails-as-API for those of us who have moved on from the asset pipeline (splitting the server side from client side).

  It would be nice to have a "API only" flag option when generating a new rails project. Something like: `rails new myapp -api`. This could keep Rails going for another 10 years.

  I'm looking into using Napa, a Grape based API framework, for the purpose of Ruby server-side API apps: https://github.com/bellycard/napa

  (Napa is to Grape as Padrino is to Sinatra)

  Related reading: http://www.divshot.com/blog/opinion/every-web-app-is-two-app...

• by tvon on 8/20/14, 3:42 AM

  So GlobalID means instead of doing `SomeJob.enqueue(instance.id)` (and then `Model.find(id)` in the job) you just do `SomeJob.enqueue(instance)`, and presumably reference something like `object` in the job?

• by gt565k on 8/20/14, 2:59 PM

  My biggest gripe about Rails are the model validations and DB adapters.

  As someone coming from Django, I hate that I have to explicitly define db related validations and catch exceptions thrown by postgres instead of it just being handled by AR with the DB adapter based on the database constraints.

  I love how Django handles that and I hope this finds its way into Rails one day.

• by martijn_himself on 8/20/14, 9:33 AM

  Sorry to 'hijack' the thread but I was wondering, as a newcomer to Ruby and Rails, what would be the best way to learn it? (without spending too much money).

  It seems to me because it is such a mature framework there are a lot of Rails-specific techniques and components to learn, this seems quite daunting to me, am I correct?

• by bdcravens on 8/20/14, 3:18 AM

  Nice to see some of the features from better_errors make it in - I always figured it'd just replace the standard exception page.

• by axx on 8/20/14, 1:22 PM

  You don't need to make everything scalable right from the start. If your business is profitable you should have enough money to think about scaling later.

  To me, the possibility to iterate fast has a much higher priority than thinking about scaling if i have a few or not that many customers.

  Thinking about performance problems when you start your first project/startup is like thinking about what to buy IF you win the lottery.

• by urs2102 on 8/20/14, 5:08 AM

  <%= console %> is a godsend

• by _mikz on 8/20/14, 6:52 AM

  I'm quite surprised by removing `respond_with` to a gem.

• by VeejayRampay on 8/20/14, 7:41 AM

  A big thank you to all the contributors who keep making Rails better and more polished at each release. Rails 4.x is great.

• by rudimk on 8/20/14, 5:08 AM

  What's the difference between the Web Console in this release, and the IRB console that comes with Better Errors?

• by boie0025 on 8/20/14, 4:20 AM

  I'm excited for the ActiveJob abstraction layer. This means I can start building things out for background work before even deciding what I want to have handle them.

• by ffn on 8/20/14, 4:59 AM

  Oh God yes, at last, 4.2. Real foreign keys, active jobs, deliver_later, etc. I guess it's true, Overlord DHH really does hear our prayers.

• by andyl on 8/20/14, 5:03 AM

  Just saw this in the release notes:

      The PostgreSQL adapter now supports the JSONB datatype in PostgreSQL 9.4+. 
  

  Indexable/queryable JSON - so fantastic.

• by andyl on 8/20/14, 3:48 AM

  One of the things I like best is the pre-announcement that Rails 5 will be built for Ruby 2.2. I appreciate the role that DHH and Rails play in keeping the community moving forward.

• by shouldbeworking on 8/20/14, 3:47 AM

  will there be a 420 celebration when it comes out?

• by oliyoung on 8/20/14, 9:31 AM

  I love Rails, it's been my tool of choice for the last six years, but "Support for real foreign keys!" shouldn't be a thing in a change-log in 2014.

• by jiggy2011 on 8/20/14, 4:56 AM

  "Adequate Record" does not exactly fill one with confidence regarding rails. This says "our last versions had inadequate performance,this one is just ok"

• by j-kidd on 8/20/14, 4:56 AM

  I feel rather underwhelmed by the performance improvement touted by adequate records. Perhaps someone from the rails community can do something like this: http://techspot.zzzeek.org/2010/12/12/a-tale-of-three-profil...