What's new in Rails 5

An excerpt from http://www.sitepoint.com/whats-new-rails-5/, by Vasu K

Rails 5 is right around the corner (currently targeting Fall 2015) and there are some exciting features coming up. If you are running a Rails shop, you need to prepare your apps for this major release.

Don’t worry. As always, we at Sitepoint will guide you throughout the migration process when the release date approaches. For now, let’s catch you up on what’s coming and how it will improve your development process.

Major Improvements

There are some amazing announcements that will fundamentally shift how we work with Rails. New features like Action Cable and improved Turbolinks that can instantly improve our web development workflow. Let’s look at each of them in detail.

Merging Rails API

Over the last few years, many thanks to Backbone.js and Angular.JS, the number of Single Page Applications (SPAs) are on the rise. The last few projects that I have built have been purely SPA and using Rails for these cases was an overkill. I tried dabbling with Sinatra and even pure Rack applications, but ended up writing too much boilerplatee. The routing was lacking compared to Rails and there were too many security vulnerabilities that I had to handle. I had to either write it on top of the community driven rails-api gems or live with traditional Rails.

In Rails 5, the rails-api gem will be merged into core allowing the use of Rails as a simple JSON API. Personally, I find this a great addition. I won’t have to look further while building an API for my javascript (and other) appliciation clients.

Ruby 2.2.1

Ruby 2.2 was a great addition to the Ruby community. Not only did it bring a huge performance boost to Ruby, but it also introduced a slew of new functions. In addition, garbage collection of symbols was widely celebrated. Legend has it that Dragons of Valeria rained down rose petals on the Seventh Kingdom when this announcement was made. OK! Maybe I took that too far, but you get the general picture.

Due to these enhancements, Ruby 2.2+ was a ripe candidate for Rails 5. Rails 5 will only work on Ruby 2.2.1 and above.

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