What's New in Edge Rails #10

Week of February 19-February 25, 2012

The biggest news this week comes on the REST front, with PATCH replacing PUT as the preferred verb for updating existing records. This has provoked some flaming and snarking (in which I have indulged), but on the whole I think it’s a reasonable change.

• ad46884a adds support for the HTTP OPTIONS method to Rails integration tests.
• 002713c6 adds support for the PATCH HTTP verb as well. According to the commit message “PATCH is the correct HTML verb to map to the #update action. The semantics for PATCH allows for partial updates, whereas PUT requires a complete replacement.”
• As of abf3f67e you can configure whether Rails flushes the log every time your write to it. Turning off log autoflushing can improve performance if you’re willing to risk the loss of a few log writes.
• force_ssl is no longer ignored by default in development. This is a change in behavior; c04a0847 has the details.
• eecb086a2 gives us the start of a Guide for updating Rails.