Upcoming Rails 7 Features: What’s New And Why It Matters?

Upcoming Rails 7 Features: What’s New And Why It Matters?

There is no doubt that Ruby on Rails fans are eagerly awaiting the release of Rails 7, and its numerous new features and updates. One of the most notable new features included in Rails 7 is Hotwire; modern and dynamic web applications can be built using this approach without having to write any JavaScript. Additionally, there have been updates to ActiveRecord, ActiveJob, ActiveStorage, ActiveRecord, and other changelogs.

The following is a quick overview of the main features you will likely use in Rails 7 features relevant to our day-to-day work.

  • Merged:- The default skeleton of Rails shouldn't require the whole JavaScript toolchain with Webpack by default. If needed, we can easily go from Hotwire to Webpack with an import mapped Hotwire. The webpack option will still be available for those who know they'll need the full JS chain (like when using React).  
  • Retry jobs indefinitely from Rails 7:- As part of Rails' Active Job framework, jobs may be declared and run asynchronously on queuing backends. There are several reasons why background jobs can fail, such as incorrect logic, database failures, network issues or queue malfunctions. Rails 7 has introduced a new syntax that enables developers to specify an indefinite runtime for a background job by passing a :unlimited option. Developers who are certain that the job failure will eventually be resolved can use this functionality.
  • PreviewError:- The ActiveStorage platform offers a wide range of storage and media management tools that are easy to use. Preview generation is one of its key features. Files created by Poppler when previews cannot be generated create 0 bytes. These files may exhibit a wide variety of unpredictable errors if any actions are performed on them, such as resizing. A new exception named PreviewError is raised by Rails 7 when a previewer child process exits with a non-0 status code. This allows the developer to plan for preview errors right at the source, instead of having to deal with unpleasant surprises later on.  
  • ActiveRecord:- In the inheritance tree of ActiveRecord::Base.logger, there are 63 modules. It cannot take advantage of the performance improvements introduced by the latest Ruby because it is implemented as a mattr_accessor, not a class variable. Using class_attribute :logger this is a huge improvement - almost 7x! A great example of a Rails application that has been improved in the real world.

Hotwire, one of the most talked-about features of Rails 7, is without a doubt the greatest feature of the new release since it has gained attention both in the Rails community and in those of other programming languages. On 16 August 2021 Creator of Ruby on Rails, Founder & CTO at Basecamp DHH tweeted a full Alpha Preview video of Rails 7. In addition to these changes, there are several other improvements from previous versions. To find out more, consult the Rails 7 Release notes and Changelogs as these are just a few of the improvements.