During DHH’s Opening Keynote of Rails World 2024 in Toronto, Rails 8 beta was
shipped with Authentication, Propshaft, Solid Cache, Solid Queue, Solid Cable,
Kamal 2, and Thruster.
Fighting Complexity in the Web:
- Rails 8 is here
- Rails has been following the latest programming trends for a while.
- DHH was never happy about this as they didn’t make sense to him.
- Webpacker in Rails 7 was an example, and DHH was never excited about it.
- Rails 7’s introduction of ES6, HTTP2, and Importmaps brought back the excitement.
- DHH’s work on HEY made him realize that the industry is wrong.
- Rails doesn’t have to follow these rules.
- HEY went 100% #NOBUILD (CSS and JS served directly to the browser as written).
- For 20 years, people have said that Rails doesn’t scale.
- @tobi proved them wrong: Shopify handled 1 million requests/second in 2023.
- The argument is settled: shut the fk up.
- JS minification killed the web as a learning platform for new developers, saving only 2-5% overhead.
- We owe it to the open web to allow view source and be proud of it.
- The trigger for DHH’s interest in #NOBUILD was when he failed to compile a JS project after leaving it alone for 5 minutes.
- The browser is forever. We can write CSS and markup from 30 years ago with no modifications.
- Craigslist is a great example.
- The more intermediaries between us and the browser we can remove, the better.
- Writing without JS and CSS pipelines isn’t for everyone, and that’s okay.
- DHH is still fired up after 20 years, pushing towards the one-person framework.
- DHH read a haiku in honor of Matz: “Progress is our path, complexity builds the bridge, simplicity waits.”
- Complexity is necessary for progress, but we stop once we’ve made things simple.
- Rails 7 ethos: rely on the browser.
{ safari: 17.2, chrome: 120, firefox: 121, opera: 106, ie: false }- The brain has a budget. Simplification helps optimize our limited monkey brains.
- DHH wants to make it easier for full-stack developers to see and keep the entire problem in their head.
- The mission of Rails is to compress the complexity of modern web apps.
Deployments:
- Ruby on Rails scales from HELLO WORLD to IPO.
- Rails 7 is great at HELLO WORLD, but the bridge to IPO is missing.
- The first step of that bridge is deployment.
- We’ve become pink elephants, tied down by learned helplessness when it comes to deployment.
- The entire industry has cultivated a fear of touching servers or being responsible for computers.
- But we’re elephants; we can break free of the tiny rope.
- AWS is amazing, but most of us don’t live in Amazon’s context.
- The price for AWS’s insurance policy is high, not just financially but complexity-wise.
- AWS wants you to stay a pink elephant forever.
- Heroku was revolutionary in 2007 but hasn’t adapted to today’s context.
- Heroku’s Performance M (1 core/2 threads/2.5GB RAM/$250/mo) was a good deal in 2012. In 2024, it’s ridiculous.
- DHH signed up for a Hetzner hobby box (48 cores/96 threads/256GB RAM/$220/mo).
- The difference is software: Heroku has nice software, but DHH prefers to make his own.
- Vercel: Let’s see who you really are! AWS with a 500% markup.
- VCs: The insecurity of developers is a mass market. Let’s tap into that!
- DHH hates software patents. They’re stupid and corrosive.
- Like medicine, software patents should expire after 20 years.
- Heroku commercialized deployment ergonomics, but we are overdue for generics.
- It shouldn’t cost $250 for basic compute. It should be 100x cheaper, and we can achieve that with open-source.
- Mission: NoBuild, NoPaaS. Rails will not require a commercial vendor for production deployment.
- The main path will be deploying to any hardware in any configuration.
- The cure for server-phobia is called LINUX.
- CBT: Cognitive-behavioral therapy, one little exposure at a time.
- OMAKUB: DHH’s favorite Linux environment.
- 90% of server security is denying password authentication with SSH.
- Lock the door. It’s fun to be competent and know Linux.
- DHH’s favorite number is 8 because when tilted, it becomes the infinity symbol.
Rails 8 Features:
- Authentication:
- Rails won’t ship with Devise, but it will generate authentication code for you.
- The code is an extraction from 37signals’ apps. You can learn it and level up.
- Propshaft:
- Propshaft simplifies the old asset pipeline.
- It solves for today’s context without old baggage.
- Propshaft is easy to understand, unlike Sprockets.
- It’s based on the idea that modern browsers allow us to ship code directly to the user.
- Solid Adapters:
- Rails 8 introduces solid adapters: solid_cable, solid_cache, solid_queue.
- It all runs from One Ring (One database system).
- SQLite: Now you don’t even have to know how to set up a database.
- Solid Cable: A SQLite-backed adapter for Action Cable, replacing Redis.
- Solid Cache:
- Basecamp uses it in production (10TB cache for 60 days, 96% hit rate).
- It supports encryption, built on top of Active Record.
- Privacy: HEY deletes everything (including logs) within 60 days.
- It can scale beyond 10TB.
- Solid Queue:
- DHH didn’t want to use 7 gems just to process jobs.
- Solid Queue is highly performant, works with all 3 major DBs, and supports recurring jobs.
- HEY runs 20 million jobs/day using Solid Queue.
- Thruster:
- Thruster replaces nginx, proxies, and other intermediaries between your app and the internet.
- It brings X-Sendfile acceleration, Cache-Control, and GZip (Brotli in the works).
- It’s installed by default in the Docker image.
- Thruster is written in Go and can handle 60,000 RPS.
- Kamal 2:
- Kamal 2 helps deploy apps to the cloud or any other environment.
- It includes Auto SSL via Let’s Encrypt and supports multiple apps on a single server.
- The team is working to eliminate the need for Docker Hub as a requirement.
Future:
- Rails 8.1:
- Action Notifier: A framework for web push notifications to get away from needing native apps.
- Active Record Search: A simpler, more intuitive search framework.
- Action Text with Markdown Support (called House MD).
- Kamal 2.1 and plenty of other great updates.