The first beta of Rails 6.0.0. has just landed! Let’s take a quick peek into this release – what can we expect?

This update got the warmest welcome among our dev team. Starting from version 6.0, Webpacker will be now the default JavaScript bundler for Rails.

And if you’re worrying about Sprockets – it will remain the recommended asset pipeline for static assets (images) and CSS. The team behind Rails 6.0.0 promises that “the two integrate very nicely and offer the best trade-off of advanced JavaScript features with an it-just-works approach to other assets.”

Rails 6.0.0 Beta1 comes with two new frameworks – Action Text and Action Mailbox.

Action Text may take your code writing to take your code writing to the next level as it will make creating, editing, and displaying rich text content in your applications far more easier. It includes the Trix editor that handles everything: formating, quotes, adding links and lists to embedded images and galleries.

Rails creators promise that Action Text is in quite good shape (for beta) although this is only an alpha preview for now and they haven’t merged it into rails yet. Having said that you can check it in action here.

A second new framework is Action Mailbox. It will allow routing incoming emails to controller-like mailboxes for processing in Rails and it will work with ingresses for Amazon SES, Mailgun, Mandrill, and SendGrid.

Ruby 6.0.0 beta1 introduces two new major features for scaling – new multiple database support and Parallel testing. The first one allows to connect one application to multiple databases at the same time. A new, easy to use API was added to make it simpler.

The second one, parallel testing support, will speed up your testing suite in multicores environment. No more warming up your CPU to the dangerous extends – each testing worker gets its own database and runs in its own thread. This will be especially useful for running heavy tests!

There is also a bunch of other new features such as Proper Action Cable testing, Action Cable JavaScript rewritten in ES6 or protection against DNS rebinding attacks. You can check the full list of updates here.

So when is the official release? That’s a good question

Rails 6 is still a long ways off, as the Rails Team writes on their blog. Current planned date is 30th of April 2019, during RailsConf 2019. Will they make it? They promise nothing but they seem to still be on schedule. For sure we can expect another beta next month followed by two Candidate releases, 1st of March and 1st of April.

Until then – Fingers crossed! It’s gonna be a major release so there’s plenty to wait for!

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