On the heels of the Railsconf 2013, the Rails 4.0 release candidate is now available. It is an upgrade from Rails 3.2 and is the result of over 1300 commits addressing the Rails 4.0 beta that went out in February. Its minimum compatibility is with Ruby 1.9.3, but the preferred language version with the release is Ruby 2.0. The combination of Ruby 2 and Rails 4 is meant to be the new standard in Rails development and brings with it many important improvements.
Rails 4 is set to increase the performance of applications. In the past optimizing Rails for speed has meant making use of client-side techniques involving a JavaScript/JSON server. Rails mitigates the need for such techniques and provides faster server-side operation. The following features are in place to achieve this goal:
- “Russian Doll-caching” via key-based expiration.
- Turbolinks, which improve access of links by keeping the page instance current rather than having to recompile JavaScript and CSS between page loads.
- Declarative etags, which allow a client to quickly determine if it has the most up-to-date content from the server.
Furthermore, Rails 4 embraces Live Streaming, a feature that makes it competitive with Node.js as far as streaming is concerned. It allows partial responses to be sent to the client immediately. In applications in which the user expects regular feedback from the client, Live Streaming allows the application to achieve this without polling and with drastically simpler code.
You can expect a trusted and experienced Rails development operation such as WGS to keep up-to-date with the latest and greatest in the technology, especially after participating in Railsconf 2013 earlier this month.
Image from robmclarty(dot)com.