Ruby on Rails 6.0 Beta 1 brings new frameworks, multiple DBs, and parallel testing

Last Friday, the first release of Rails 6 was announced. Two new major frameworks are added in Rails 6.0 Beta 1 called Action Mailbox and Action Text. There are also two scalable upgrades in the form of multiple database support and parallel testing.

Action Mailbox in Rails 6.0 Beta 1

This new framework guides incoming emails to controller-like mailboxes in order for processing to take place in Rails. Action Mailbox comes with ingresses for Amazon SES, Mailgun, Mandrill, Postmark, and SendGrid. Users can also manage incoming emails directly via the built-in Exim, Postfix, and Qmail ingresses.

Action Text in Rails 6.0 Beta 1

This framework brings rich text and enables editing such files in Rails. The Trix editor is introduced to handle tasks like formatting to links, quotes, lists to embedded images and galleries. Trix editor has its own RichText model to save rich text generated by it. This model is associated with existing Active Record models in the application. Embedded images and other attachments are stored by default via Active Storage and they are associated with the RichText model.

Multiple database support

The introduction of multiple database support facilitates a single application to connect to multiple databases simultaneously. This can be done to segment certain records into their own databases for scaling or isolation. It can also be useful if you’re performing read/write splitting with replica databases to improve performance.

Regardless of the applications, there’s a simple API in Rails 6.0 for this task without having to dig into Active Record internals.

Support for parallel testing

You can now utilize all the cores in your computer to run big test suites faster with parallel testing support. Every testing worker has a separate database and thread so all the CPUs will be utilized effectively.

Webpacker is the default JavaScript bundler for Rails 6.0 via the new app/javascript directory. The asset pipeline with Sprockets for CSS and static assets integrate well while offering the best trade-off of advanced JavaScript features.

Rails 6.0 will need Ruby 2.5.0 or later. Rails 6.0 Beta 2 should be out next month and the final release in April in time for the RailsConf 2019. You can look at the changelog files to know more about the changes.

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