This week in Rails

Rails 4.2.0.beta2 has been released

Thanks to everyone involved in the beta-testing process, we have identified and fixed a number of bugs in the first beta of Rails 4.2.0. As we are moving further along into the release process, this is a great time to start testing it with your apps!

Welcome Yves and Godfrey to Rails core

The Rails core team has gained two new members! The latest additions to the team are Yves Senn and yours truly ;) Get to know them and the other core team members on the Rails website!

THANK YOU YEHUDA!!!

Also found in the same announcement blog post was the news that the legendary Yehuda Katz is retiring from the Rails core team. (Hint: It's a great time to send a thank you note on Twitter to express your gratutide.) Check out the core alumni page for a list of heroes who helped shape Rails into the framework we love today.

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New Active Job API

As part of Rails 4.2.0.beta2, the Active Job API received a facelift to enable it handle more complex queueing scenarios, while keeping things simple for the more common cases.

Speed up fixtures

By removing some legacy code, fixtures loading (and hence your tests) will be significantly faster in Rails 4.2!

Stop sorting HTML attributes

In addition to fixtures, tag rendering is also getting a little bit of a speed boost. As noted in the pull request, the tag helpers in Rails used to sort the HTML attributes alphabetically, which turned out to be unnecessary.

If you making assertions on their output in your tests, you should switch over to the assert_dom_equal-family helpers.

Put your callbacks after the association definitions!

You might not be aware of this, but defining callbacks (e.g. after_create) before the associations (e.g. has_many :comments) might result in undesirable side-effects. There are plans to improve this situation though, you can follow this ticket for progress.

Default bind address for `rails server` has changed

Due to an upstream change in Rack, the default value for the -b (the bind address) option in rails server has changed from 0.0.0.0 (listen on all interfaces) to localhsot (listen on the loopback interface only), which means that, the development server can only be accessed from your own computer by default.