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The development of Ruby on Rails 7 is a cosmic leap in the development of the framework towards the simplification of web development in tandem with contemporary trends. This update primarily emphasizes enhancing developer productivity, modernizing Javascript handling, and the support of real-time features, all of these without neglecting the convention-over-configuration design principle embedded in Rails. Several of the foremost developments and features in Rails 7 are hinted at below.
1. Hotwire Integration: A Game Changer for Real-Time Features
Rails 7 introduces Hotwire, a framework for building modern web applications that rely lightly on JavaScript frameworks. Hotwire includes Turbo and Stimulus which Turbo helps developers build reactive and real-time views with a light touch. Turbo Streams update parts of a page from the server, thereby avoiding custom Javascript, while Turbo Frames reload only parts of a page.
Stimulus makes pages interactive by binding server-rendered results back to the frontend by using the least JavaScript necessary.
This integration is just perfect for developers who want the right mix of performance and simplicity without using client-heavy libraries, like React or Vue.
2. JavaScript Modernization: Farewell Webpacker
Rails 7 has put an end to the use of Webpacker in favor of lightweight options such as Importmaps, esbuild, and rollup.
Importmaps enable you to pin JavaScript packages and load them directly in the browser, thereby eliminating the need to use bundlers.
If a more traditional workflow with hybrid bundling should be necessary, esbuild and rollup are equally supported with better compilation speed and modern tools.
With these changes, Rails has become quite adaptive to the flow of changes in the JavaScript ecosystem with better dependency management while catering to a number of project specifications.
3. Async Query Loading: Allowing Parallel Execution
Rails 7 introduces async querying through Active Record. With this functionality, multiple database queries can run in parallel, yielding better support on pages that require fetching larger amounts of data. This will prove beneficial for dashboards and analytics-heavy applications that commonly execute queries across several related models.
Asynchronous querying allows Rails to help mitigate the slowdown from sequential database requests and thereby provides a more responsive experience for users.
4. Encrypted Attributes: More Secure by Default
Rails 7 builds in support for encrypted attributes, thus making it easy for developers to store sensitive data in the database. By utilizing the encrypts method on specific columns within their models, developers can encrypt sensitive data more easily and thereby do well to protect that information to meet data protection regulations like GDPR and HIPAA.
The encrypted data is only readable to the Rails applications that possess a valid master key, thus reducing the chance of a data breach.
5. Zeitwerk Improvements: Smarter Code Loading
The code loader, Zeitwerk, employed since Rails 6, has been made a bit stronger in Rails 7. The changes make the loader more compatible with edge conditions difficult enough to give nerve to build applications with out of the box file structures. In the grand code, it still performs autoloading, reloading, and eager loading well, which means faster development cycles and less pain in production.
6. Update of Action Mailbox and Action Text
Rails 7 introduces a lot of new features regarding Action Mailbox and Action Text, their tools for email workflows and rich text content:
Action Mailbox accelerates and enhances email processing, thus improving the way Rails applications receive and process incoming email.
Action Text has been deepened to introduce rich text edits, including embedded images and attachments to enhance user-generated content workflows.
These updates make Rails even more appealing for content-intensive applications, such as blogging and customer support tools.
7. Active Storage: Better File Handling
The file upload and management framework has received some improvements through Rails 7 in Active Storage:
- Direct uploads are faster and more reliable now.
- Video previews support additional formats and codecs.
- Blob streaming improves performance by permitting files to stream straight from the cloud storage providers.
The changes in Active Storage now put it in contention for being one of the perfect solutions for dealing with files in Rails applications, as compared to third-party solutions.
8. Database and Migration Improvements
Rails 7 has brought many improvements into the database and migrations:
Interval support in PostgreSQL: The interval column will get mapped to ActiveSupport::Duration, rather than just plain strings, making it convenient for making time-based calculations.
Bulk changes: Active Record handles bulk operations more effectively now. Consequently, this leads to less load on the database during migrations and updates.
PostgreSQL Encryption: The encrypted attributes can be integrated directly for secure storage of sensitive data at the database level.
The above changes, in some sense, with the modern tools for inserting the database and other inherent common friction points for the developers.
