ZOMG! Welcome to This week month in Rails, we are finally back in business after a long break. So much has happened in Rails since the last issue, so let's dive right into it!
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!
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!
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.
So far, I have been running this newsletter by myself. Unfortunately, as you might have noticed, I wasn't able to dedicate as much time to this newsletter as it deserves, especially when other tasks and travelling get in the way.
The Good News™? You can help! If you are interested in joining force to curate this newsletter, keeping our 1000+ readers in the loop about the latest development in Rails, please drop me a line!
(Special thanks to the Goodbits team for working on the new collebration features that makes this possible!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wrapping up
And that's it for this issue of This week month in Rails. As always, there are a lot more changes on Rails than what I can cover in this newsletter, so I encourage you to check them out yourself!
If you have any feedback for me, please feel free to email me or let me know on twitter! Thank you for reading! <3 <3 <3