Rails is a Ruby framework that includes everything needed to create web applications. This was our fourth Summer of Code participation, and in this post we'd like to tell you a bit about this year's projects.
Asset Source Maps (Andrei Istratii)
Andrei has added support for several types of Source Maps to Sprockets 4. With Source Maps users can see a readable version of their code inside Developer Tools (Javascript, CSS, etc.) after it's been minified or compiled. Check out Andrei's sprockets and sass-rails repositories to find out more about the project updates.
Test Failure Prediction (Genki Sugimoto)
Genki Sugimoto created a testing library called ttnt. It suggests which tests are relevant to a particular commit inside your application, allowing you to skip full test suite runs when possible.
Web Console (Hiroyuki Sano)
The Rails Web Console helps Rails developers debug running applications inside the browser. This project was created in 2013 by Genadi Samokovarov as part of that year's GSoC. In 2015 Hiroyuki Sano improved it by creating a browser extension so you can use the console inside the Developer Tools.
Performance Enhancements for the Asset Pipeline (Martha De Luque)
Martha focused on finding and addressing performance issues inside our asset generation pipeline. With her work we now have support for faster asset compilation libraries, and thanks to her benchmarks we now know where to focus our future optimization efforts.
Evented File System Monitoring (Puneet Agarwal)
Rails monitors application files when running in development mode, if any change is detected the application code is reloaded on the next request. Currently Rails walks the application tree to detect said changes, Puneet's contribution implements an alternative using native operating system events.
Refactoring Rails Cookie Internals (Siddharth Bhatore)
Siddharth worked on laying the infrastructure for a more robust implementation of cookies in Rails. Some of his changes include support for JSON Web Encryption (JWE) and JSON Web Signatures (JWS). With these changes in place we can add cool features like cookie purposes and coherent expiration.
Merged.