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

This week we pushed a beta release for Rails 4.2 with tons of new features. If you have been following this newsletter you probably heard about most of these already ;) Click through for the announcement blog post or read the release notes to learn more.

Rails 5.0 will require Ruby 2.2

Also buried in the Rails 4.2 announcement blog post: Rails 5.0 is scheduled for next spring/summer, and it will require Ruby 2.2. This allow us to adopt the latest and greatest language features, such as keyword arguments. We can also rely on symbol GC and eliminate an entire class of security bugs!

Rails Contributors: Rails 4.2 Edition

The 4.2 Beta release is made possible with the help of these 488 contributors. If you ever bump into them, give them a big hug!

[HELP WANTED] Document Rails 4.2

Currently, the documentation for 4.2 needs lots of love. If you would like to contribute to the release, here is your chance!

[SECURITY] Rails 4.0.9 and 4.1.5

If you haven't already, you should consider upgrading to 4.0.9 and 4.1.5 as soon as possible. These are security releases, which means that they contain only the relevant security patch and nothing else, so upgrading should be straightforward.

[PATCH] Rails 4.1.6.rc1 and 4.0.10.rc1

Earlier this week, we also did a maintenance release for the 4.1 and 4.0 series with lots of bug fixes. (Did I mention it was a busy week?) We have discovered a regression since, so you will probably see another RC releases soon™.

Active Job landed in master

Active Job was one of the biggest features included in Rails 4.2. It is a queue abstract/adapter layer that enables developers (and gem authors as well) to schedule background jobs using a uniform API across all Rails apps without worrying too much about the backend (e.g. sidekiq or resque). (By default, it ships with an inline runner that executes the job immediately.)

The first use case for this feature is in Action Mailer: it now comes with a #deliver_later method that does what you would expect! (Consequently, #deliver is deprecated in favor the new #deliver_now.)

Smart ETags

This pull requests makes the ETags generated from Rails smarter: by including the digest of the corresponding template in the ETag, Rails will know to invalidate the cached content when the template has changed. (This is relevant when you generate an ETags from the controller, as opposed to those automatically generated by Rack::ETag.)

Add a `required` option to the model generator

This new option takes care of adding the required validation on the belongs to association, as well as adding the NOT NULL and foreign key constraints in the migration. Neat, eh?

Add option to stop swallowing errors on transactional callbacks

Currently, Active Record only log errors that happened in after_commit and after_rollback callbacks. In Rails 5.0, this behavior would change to simply bubbling the errors, maintaining the parallel between other types of callbacks. To ease the transition, you can enable the new behavior today using a configuration flag in Rails 4.2 (or you will receive a warning otherwise).

Enable gzip compression by default

If you are using Rails to serve your asset files, this pull request is going to improve your client-side performance by enabling gzip compression!

Production log level now defaults to :debug on new applications

This gives you more detailed information that might come in handy when debugging issues your users are experiencing.

Stronger Parameters

This pull request adds #to_h to ActionController::Parameters which returns a new hash with any unpermitted keys stripped out. This is a compromise to migrate away from inheriting Hash in Rails 5.0, so you might want to take notes and start calling to_h on your params before calling Hash methods on it.

Randomized testing in your app

If you are using the default testing stack in Rails 4.2, your application's tests will be randomized by default, to reflect the default of this setting on Minitest itself.

We don't suck <3

If your tests are order-dependent though, you can simply call my_tests_are_order_dependent! at the top of your test case, thanks to this lovely commit!

Finally, none of our tests are order_dependent!

Thanks to a joint effort from several contributors (including some of our GSoC students), the Rails test suite can finally be run randomized!

Extract `respond_with` to the `responders` gem

respond_with and the class-level respond_to methods have been extracted from Rails into the responders gem. If you are using this feature, you'll have to add that to your Gemfile when upgrading to Rails 4.2.