[ANN] Rails 0.5.0: The end of vaporware!

On July 25, 2004, DHH released the first public version of Rails to the world. On this coming Thursday, we will finally see the first batch of applicants for jobs that require 10 years of Rails experience.

The Rails contributors

Since DHH made the first public release of Rails 10 years ago, over 3500 individuals (the real number is likely to be a lot higher) have contributed to the Rails source code and documentation.

Jon Leighton is the latest Rails core team alumni

Known for his amazing work on Active Record and spring, Jon Leighton is now officially a core team alumni. You can thank him for his work and follow his latest adventures on twitter.

[EXPERIMENTAL] Run actionpack tests in parallel

To be clear, this is about running (a small subset of) Rails' own test cases in parallel, and it does not affect how your app's test cases are executed, but still pretty cool nonetheless. (If you are using minitest, and you know that your app is thread-safe, you can also try this at home and see how it goes!)

`Digest.uuid_v3` and `Digest.uuid_v5`

These methods were previously added in #12016, but they have found a new home with this commit in the Digest module. Unlike version 4, which uses a random source, these two versions of UUID are based on the MD5 and SHA1 hash functions and is suitable for cases where you would like to generate the same "stable" UUIDs when given the same input.

Validate the options passed to `validate`

This probably happened to the best of us at some point when working on Rails projects – using validate when you meant to use validates. This would hopefully help you catch these mistakes earlier and easier.

Improve `ActiveModel::Dirty` API

Last week we covered the new APIs in ActiveModel::Dirty for restoring in-memory changes. To prevent confusion around some similarly named methods, the related APIs have been renamed to restore_attributes and restore_* (e.g. restore_name). See also this related commit.

`Hash#transform_values` now returns an `Enumerator`

Hash#transform_values was another addition we covered last week. With this pull request, it has learned to return an Enumerator object when used without a block to be more like its cousins in Ruby's Enumerable module. (There's also some interesting tidbits in there about how Ruby work with the &block argument internally.)

Documentation for Rails' assertion helpers

On top of minitest's built-in assertion helpers, Rails defined certain extra convenience helpers such as assert_not_* and assert_predicate. These tend to read nicer in most contexts and sometimes provide better error messages.

Use `#bytesize` instead of `#size` when checking for cookie size

When working with non-ASCII charsets, String#size might be different from String#bytesize. While you would usually want #size, #bytesize might come in handy when working at a lower level (such as this case).