Weeks of November 19 -December 2, 2012

Most of the work in Rails in the past couple of weeks has been fit-and-finish: speeding up a test here, rewording a comment there, fixing an uncommon edge case. Though there’s been no announcement, it’s really starting to seem like Rails 4 is close to release.

• ccecab3b removes observers and sweepers completely from core Rails. If your application depends on them, you can install the new https://github.com/rails/rails-observers gem.

Week of November 12 - November 18, 2012

• With 57b333e2 and c940aa6e Rails is finally using trunk mocha without monkey patches.
• A batch of work merged at ef8b845d enables an EncryptedCookieJar store for Rails to use encrypted cookies.

Week of November 5 - November 11, 2012

• 710e3710 adds an option for custom naming of counter caches on has many associations.

Week of October 29 - November 4, 2012

• 0b7067d8 adds a call stack for deprecation warnings.

Week of October 22 - October 28, 2012

• ActiveRecord::Model was removed at 9e4c41c99 after a decision that the complexity outweighed the benefits. This was an experiment including AR functionality without inheriting from ActiveRecord::Base.

Week of October 15 - October 21, 2012

The asset pipeline came in for some work this week with a new version of the sprockets-rails gem and some other refactoring.

• eb72e62 adds find_or_create_by which has a slightly different API from first_or_create.
• There’s a new “Working With JavaScript” guide committed in 4d0c43e6.

Week of October 8 - October 14, 2012

Moving forward with the Rails asset pipeline is a good overview of the changes coming in this area in 4.0.

• 2a68f68a changes the default test locations to match the default source tree - for example, tests for models are now in test/models.
• Rails is moving to the Ruby 1.9 hash syntax everywhere - for example, 5ad7f8ab makes the changes in railties.

Week of October 1 - October 7, 2012

The latest Rails performance brainstorm is turbolinks, which makes reloading just the page body the default for intra-application links. I’m skeptical, but it’ll probably work out fine except for annoying and hard to track down edge-case breakage.

• e35d8b18 turns turbolinks on by default for all new applications.
• There’s a new ActiveSupport::KeyGenerator that wraps PBKDF2 for use in making more secure keys. The merge is in 0a507925.
• Action and Page caching have been extracted to separate gems; see c82cf81f for details.
• rack-cache is no longer installed by default, though as ab4c0795 shows you can turn it on easily.

Week of September 24 - September 30, 2012

• Various tweaks to Rails logging & log tagging went in this week, including automatic tagging of the test log with the current test class and test case in 86ebe0bd.
• 7e0cf563 makes Mailer.deliver_foo(*args) a synonym for Mailer.foo(*args).deliver. Yay for easier tests.

Week of September 17 - September 23, 2012

Along with changes to the code itself, the Rails Guides have now been converted from Textile to Markdown. As someone who had to work with the Textile version in the past I’m quite happy with this.

• The new ruby template handler extension has changed from .rb to .ruby as of de1060f4, to avoid conflicts with mustache views.
• As of c49d959e the code from strong_parameters is integrated directly into Rails. All Action Controller parameters must now be explicitly permitted before they can be used in Active Model mass assignments.
• As of 392eeecc Rails allows specifying the transaction isolation level in Active Record (if your database supports it).
• It’s an early draft, but the Rails 4.0 Release Notes are now on the Edge Guides site.