RailsConf 2015 was hosted in the towering downtown Atlanta, Georgia. I was grateful to have been sent to attend this year thanks to my rather awesome employer.

Atlanta, Georgia

Rails 5 was a large topic of discussion during DHH’s opening keynote. A couple of the big feature announcements were Turbolinks 3 and Action Cable. Despite my tongue-in-cheek post title, I’m actually looking forward to trying both of these features.

Back when I built WorksTiming I ended up keeping Turbolinks enabled. For the mostly-static dashboards it uses on the backend, the standard functionality provided by Rails 4.x works pretty great; the only caveat being of course the DOM on ready listener issue which actually isn’t that difficult to fix.

I also settled on using Pusher to provide live updating features using websockets. I’ve been on the lookout for a better alternative since, with some promising possibilities, but having a websocket story integrated into the core of Rails is a welcome addition.

Another great announcement in Rails 5 is the integration of the Rails API work that’s been happening to make a slimmer starting point for building API only or JS heavy applications. Read more about this decision direct from one who helped make it happen: Santiago Pastorino: Rails API to be part of Rails 5.

All in all I had a great time this week at the conference and look forward to following the development of Rails 5. Check out the keynote accouncements on Confreaks’ YouTube channel if you missed it.