Rails 5.0: Action Cable, API mode, and so much more

After six months of polish, four betas, and two release candidates, Rails 5.0 is finally done! It’s taken hundreds of contributors and thousands of commits to get here, but what a destination: Rails 5.0 is without a doubt the best, most complete version of Rails yet. It’s incredible that this community is still going so strong after so long. Thanks to everyone who helped get us here.

The two star features of Rails 5.0 are as follows:

Action Cable

Action Cable is a brand-new framework for handling WebSockets in Rails. It’s a completely integrated solution for managing connections, a channels layer for server-side processing, and a JavaScript layer for client-side interaction. It’s incredibly easy to use, and makes designing live features like chat, notifications, and presence so much easier. It’s what’s powering all those features of Basecamp 3, if you want to see it in action.

What’s really lovely about Action Cable is that you get access to your entire Active Record and PORO domain model in your WebSockets work. We even added a brand-new ActionController::Renderer system that makes it trivial to render your templates outside of controllers, when you want to reuse server-side templates for WebSocket responses.

In development, Action Cable runs in-process with the rest of your app. To do this, we’ve switched the default development server from Webrick to Puma. In production, you may well want to run Action Cable servers in their own processes. That’s how we run it at Basecamp at scale.

Special thanks to Pratik Naik, Javan Makhmali and Matthew Draper for their formative work on Action Cable.

API mode

Rails is not only a great choice when you want to build a full-stack application that uses server-side rendering of HTML templates, but also a great companion for the new crop of client-side JavaScript or native applications that just needs the backend to speak JSON. We’ve made this even clearer now with the new –api mode. If you create a new Rails application using rails new backend –api, you’ll get a slimmed down skeleton and configuration that assumes you’ll be working with JSON, not HTML.

There’s still more work to be done on this feature, but we’re off to a great start. By default, API mode just relies on #to_json calls on model classes. But you can either use Jbuilder, Active Model Serializers, or look at the new JSONAPI::Resources project for a more advanced solution.

Source : http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/