Exploring the New Features of Rails 7

Pablo Adell
3 min readJan 23, 2023

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Photo by Joshua Fuller on Unsplash

The Exciting Updates Coming with Rails 7

Over the last few years, the Ruby on Rails web development framework has matured and solidified its position as one of the leading open source development platforms for building powerful web applications. With the upcoming Rails 7 release, developers and users can look forward to further streamlining of features and functionality.

Main changes and features

Rails 7 focuses on improving the performance and scalability of applications. It introduces a number of features and refinements that allow developers to take advantage of the latest development tools and technologies, as well as enhance the overall user experience. Some of the defining features of Rails 7 that promise to make applications faster and more secure include:

  • Action Mailbox: Rails 7 adds Action Mailbox, a new feature to route incoming emails to controllers and mailers. It also enables users to receive and store attachments, parse incoming emails and take action.
  • Action Text: Action Text is another new feature in Rails 7 that makes it easy to edit, format and incorporate text into your application. With the help of this feature, developers can easily incorporate rich text editing into their applications.
  • Multiple Database Support: Rails 7 now supports multiple databases that can be easily switched depending on the data structure of the application. This will give developers more flexibility when designing and building applications from scratch.
  • Webpacker as a Default JavaScript Compiler: Rails 5 introduced webpacker as a JavaScript compiler and Rails 7 now provides it as the default for compatibility with Rails 6. This ensures users have access to the latest features, tools and technologies available.
  • Parallel Testing: Rails 7 now supports parallel testing, which allows developers to split up tests and run them in parallel, allowing for faster testing. This decreases the development time and accelerates the process of rolling out new features and updates.
  • Active Storage: Active Storage is a built-in storage system in Rails 7 that makes it easy to manage files and images while keeping the code simple and organized.
  • Improving Performance: Rails 7 has also made efforts to improve the performance of web applications by introducing faster route loading and parallel testing.

Conclussion

Rails 7 promises to be an exciting upgrade and a milestone release. Developers can look forward to all these new features and improvements that are sure to make applications more powerful, reliable and efficient.

Rails 7 also includes changes to the Active Storage API, which simplifies the way a developer interacts with the cloud storage layer. Developers can now store files and images on the cloud, and then access them from their Rails application with ease.

Finally, Rails 7 introduces a number of performance enhancements to the Rails API that increase the speed of queries and applications. This makes it much easier to create high performing applications that are faster to process requests from end users.

In summary, Rails 7 is a major evolutionary step for the Ruby on Rails framework. With improved asset compilation, new Action Mailer features, and a host of performance enhancements, developers have more options than ever before to create great web applications.

References

For those looking to learn more about the advances in the Rails 7 platform, the following books are recommended:

- Agile Web Development with Rails 7: Learn to design, build, and deploy database-driven web applications — Sam Ruby

- Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Web Development with Rails (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series) — Micahel Hartl

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Pablo Adell
Pablo Adell

Written by Pablo Adell

Hello there!! My name is Pablo, I am a Full-Stack Software Engineer at Affirm, focused mainly in Ruby on Rails and React. I hope you enjoy my content!

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