Rails 7.1 Released

Rails is great, and better than ever. I&#x27;ve spent most of my early years in the field working with Django and Laravel, then moved to frontend doing [all the usual stuff we do nowadays] and this year I was assigned back to a Rails + Hotwire project.<p>I&#x27;m truly amazed how much simpler things are. I feel sad most of us have forgotten how easier things could be, and I&#x27;m terrified about new people joining this industry that will never know about how easier things could be because they&#x27;ll never experience that (as things are right now, who knows the future...).<p>If you&#x27;re reading this and never tried Rails, or discarded it because you listened somebody say the usual &quot;PHP is ugly&#x2F;Rails is dead&#x2F;JavaScript is messy&quot; give it a try with an open mind and ignore what others say for a moment. I can&#x27;t recommend it enough.<p>It might not be the best tool if you have 1k engineers working on the same repository, but as a small team it has no competitors, it&#x27;s just miles ahead everything else (well, honestly, maybe Laravel is as good).

I took a 13,000 line Rails 7.0 app and updated it to 7.1. I had to change 1 line of test configuration code to make everything work beyond the diff between 7.0 and 7.1[0].<p>I would say that&#x27;s a success for having an easy upgrade path. Now the fun part is going back to refactor some of the code to use the new features in 7.1.<p>If anyone is curious, I updated my Rails &#x2F; Docker example app to use 7.1 too <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nickjj&#x2F;docker-rails-example">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nickjj&#x2F;docker-rails-example</a>. Even though Rails 7.1 comes with a Dockerfile, there&#x27;s still a lot of opinions you can add such as using Docker Compose to have a fully working out of the box experience that works in development and production -- complete with Postgres, Redis, Action Cable, Sidekiq and more.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;railsdiff.org&#x2F;7.0.8&#x2F;7.1.0" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;railsdiff.org&#x2F;7.0.8&#x2F;7.1.0</a>

Currently stuck on a fairly large code base on rails 6 with a ton of react and trying to upgrade to the new “non”-JS way with Hotwire. Wish me luck<p>Rails is great when you stick with the defaults and a land of pain as soon as you leave them.

Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I love Rails, and have been using it off and on since Rails 2.<p>It&#x27;s a really good framework, and for someone like me who needs to stand up a website from time to time it really is the path of least resistance.<p>What bugs me is the pain of setting up a new laptop to run Rails. I need node, which means npm. I&#x27;m a backend guy, I don&#x27;t understand how to set up node, what order to do things in, etc. I do it rarely enough that it always seems a fight. Eventually I get it done, but I&#x27;m never sure why it finally all comes together.<p>An installer that puts together all the requirements so my rails just works would be great. The rvm installer will set up rails on top of ruby but won&#x27;t set up the node system underneath it.

I am hoping for a renaissance of Rails + HTMX with some sprinkles of JS on very interactive pages.<p>Using Rails with Slim&#x2F;HAML is an absolute bliss. If you prefer there are also libraries like `ViewComponents` that can facilitate partial rendering even further. Add in some web components and you can build very interactive pages with it. Even use React if you really need it in specific pages.<p>HATEOAS cuts the complexity of applications drastically. And if you still need APIs, it&#x27;s extremely easy to respond to different mime types and even have the same endpoints if you desire.<p>IME the majority of applications that use React don&#x27;t need it at all. They use React for a couple of menus that have to pop ups. So hopefully once some larger apps start popping up with no React (or only sprinkles of it), it finally clicks for some people how unnecessarily complex our applications are today.<p>But I already read comments saying they need to switch to React because everyone else uses it. SMH.<p>One can dream!

The official announcement here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rubyonrails.org&#x2F;2023&#x2F;10&#x2F;5&#x2F;Rails-7-1-0-has-been-released" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rubyonrails.org&#x2F;2023&#x2F;10&#x2F;5&#x2F;Rails-7-1-0-has-been-relea...</a> has a few more high level details. Looking forward to using some of these new changes (some of the new async query methods will be very useful for some quick performance wins).

Rails on the backend doesn’t get the credit it deserves.<p>On the front-end it’s been a mess for a really long while now though

A friend of mine joked a couple weeks ago that if a Rails release is announced but I hadn&#x27;t submitted a PR (to upgrade), has it really happened?<p>Well, here we go, PR coming up. Even if it has to stack behind the 7.0 one that&#x27;s been sitting there for months.

In my experience many teams have problems establishing a clean code base with ActiveRecord.

Don&#x27;t beat me, but still on rails 4.2 and happy... Gives me everything I need for no&#x2F;low JS backend SaaS stuff I do for my self and B2B companies, running on low end VPSs...<p>If you have time to answer - why would I upgrade?

I really like Rails and for a long time I used it and lived fairly well off of it.<p>I used to make good money doing upgrades from one version to another as well...<p>I hear your gripes here... I think with Rails if you run into problems, this is because you created (or someone in your org) them for you.

Are they gonna change the governance at the last minute like with Turbo?

I hope to see the Hotwire dependency dropped one day. I love Rails and Hotwire, but I wish the latter were also a community tool. When TypeScript support was discontinued, DHH commented:<p>&gt; This project has been founded, funded, and maintained predominantly by the resources and investment of 37signals. We will set the direction as we see fit...<p>With TensorFlow recently discontinuing support for Windows, it&#x27;s very concerning to me that one day one person or organization decides that &quot;we will set the direction&quot;.<p>They don&#x27;t even try to use nicer language. Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I respect the work and effort. But 37signals are no saints. There was a scandal, and employee exodus not so long ago.<p>Hotwire is so deeply integrated into Rails, so Rails is even more 37signals&#x27; tool than ever before. Before we had webpack, and JavaScript libraries that sometimes were not easy to use. Now things are easier, but instead of JS libraries we&#x27;ve gotten 37signals dependency, which is VERY concerning.

Would anyone start a new project with Rails today?<p>If someone suggested using Rails for a new project to me today, I would show them the door.<p>There are so many more mature frameworks in more robust and performant languages.<p>IMO the only reason to use Rails today is if you’re too uncurious to learn something better.

I am Rails dev, and I don&#x27;t like the fact that Rails in every new version has to REINVENT ALL THE WHEELS, ALL THE TIME. That creates huge problems for Rails devs and stakeholders.<p>Rails is based on Ruby, which is backend language, and Rails should stay more on backend.<p>That means<p><pre><code> - session management - routing and controllers - many API options (REST, json-rpc, ...) + JSON object exporters - ORM, Mailing, etc - server template renders (ViewCells are still not part of Rails) - tasks, logging and other helpers </code></pre> In the same way Rails adopted rake gem as default task runner, without re-inventing it as &quot;ActiveCliTasks&quot;, they could have created standardised connector layer that will exchange objects between backend and frontend.<p>So no Stimulus, TurboLinks, HotWire and other stuff one HAS TO learn and re-learn between versions. Svelte, Vue and React should have been officially supported with thin connectors. Rails server render layer can easily be integrated in any existing frontend tech, as alternative to React server components insanity.<p>Also, there is no reason to have to have socket connection to pass HTML between server and client, good old RPC is just fine as 99% of big app scaling problems are Database problems, no need for another layers of complexity one has to ensure it works.<p>I think, in that way Rails could &quot;shine&quot; far into the future, using its strong points but adopting new frontend stuff on the way, not re-inventing it all the time.