Rails World 2024 Recap: Key Business Benefits
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Last week, Rails World 2024 took place, and they’ve released the keynote video. It’s packed with exciting technical updates, but here are a few key takeaways that matter at the business level.
Asset Management
Assets (images, javascript, and styles) for your application have traditionally been managed using a few tools like Sprockets, Webpack, and NPM/Yarn. This gives a lot of flexibility but at the cost of extreme complexity.
In the past, this complexity was necessary due to browser and internet limitations. But today, we can simplify things by dropping support for outdated browsers.
This not only reduces operational headaches but can significantly boost loading speeds, as modern browsers handle assets more efficiently.
Solid *
There are now three members in the Solid * family: Solid Cable, Solid Cache, and Solid Queue.
These tools can replace existing ones that rely on secondary databases like Redis. Instead, they work with your current database or a simpler option, like SQLite.
From a business standpoint, these tools offer two major advantages:
- Simplified infrastructure and cost savings
- Leverage affordable, high-performance storage for larger cache datasets.
That second point is especially interesting for caching, where the size of the live dataset is the primary concern. Solid Cache lets you have thousands of gigs of active cache instead of tens or hundreds.
Deployment
The suite of Solid tools simplifies deployment, and with Kamal 2 and Thruster, the process becomes even more seamless.
Thruster enhances asset delivery efficiency and automatically handles SSL security.
Kamal automates the packaging of your application and streamlines the deployment process.
This delivers the benefits of a platform like Heroku—at just 1% of the cost when paired with providers like Hetzner.
Hotwire Native
Now I am cheating here since Hotwire Native was announced a couple days before Rails World, but this is my email and I can do what I want!
Hotwire Native replaces Turbo Native and Strada—the Rails tools used to create native iOS or Android apps powered by your website. It’s essentially version 2.0 of these tools, offering significant improvements.
This is actually the update that I am personally most excited for. Having a native app that you can update remotely, fix bugs, and control with all the benefits of a web application is phenomenal.
Overall
Wow. I’ve long been a fan of Ruby on Rails, and as a solo software consultant, I am very excited with how they are doubling down on the single-developer framework mindset.
The updates coming with Rails 8 will make it that much easier to rapidly build truly impressive web applications with a small team.