Rails 5: Ruby on Rails Website Development
At MindVision we are constantly moving to be on the edge of technology. Having our primary platform being Ruby on Rails we are pleased to announce that we have started using the new release of Rails; Rails 5.
Being a company that has been around for 20 years now, we have a strong relationship with our customers and a deep trust that we will make the right decisions in moving their technical investments forward. So migrating to a new release of a framework is a big move that requires a lot of testing and well thought out planning. We simply can’t make our customers guinea pigs of new technology, even though many Rails community members have robustly tested it.
Since the first beta release, our staff members have kept a keen eye on the testing phases and “gotchas” that other people have been reporting while performing many tests themselves. Now with all the in-house testing complete, we are pleased to announce we now have 2 current running projects in Rails 5 with the migration and much more coming!
So I’d like to take you all through what Rails 5 brings to the table and how it can benefit your business pursuits.
Action Cable
Action cable is a seamless integration of Websockets into your system. Action cable, through Websockets, allows real-time features to be implemented. Think live messaging, system notifications, online lists; the list is endless. While methods of doing these have been around for a while, bringing Action Cable into the Rails core allows for simpler, tighter integration and more stable methods to achieve it. This is opposed to everyone writing their own custom implementations and a fragmented direction.
API only applications
Rails provide so many useful backend helpers and methodologies, this makes it so beautiful and pleasant to program in. Such tooling and refined processes are very beneficial to making robust and reliable software that it is hard to look elsewhere. However with the current trend of single page applications, React, Ember, (insert any awesome JavaScript framework here), having that overhead was definitely a concern. The new API only applications will reduce a lot of the overhead that brought great browser support that is no longer needed in such applications
Turbolinks 5
While not directly related to rails, Turbolinks is heavily maintained by the core contributors at Rails and has shared a close release with Rails 5.
Turbolinks brings smoother loading of pages on your site. Instead of having to reload a lot of the extra overheads with each page, Turbolinks works by only requesting the content it needs from the server to create the page you have navigated to. This increases load times dramatically, and also a lot smoother as you don’t have a blank screen while new pages are loaded in.
The above are the major highlights that you, the client facing users of Rails will most likely leverage. The list is not limited there; a lot of backend end functionality came with the release. This provides us with loads of more features and potential to deliver quicker and more robust results to your business’s ever changing demands.
Check out our Custom Software, web and mobile application development services here