[solved] Agile Web Development with Rails 8: Conflict between Preface and Who This Book Is For? (B3.0, page xvii)

I’m just curious: in the preface, it says, “The biggest non-deployment related change is the introduction of a basic authentication generator.” And then in the last bullet point of “Who This Book Is For”, it says, “The Rails team has chosen not to include plenty of features—such as user authentication…”. As a carryover from at least the Rails 7/7.2 book(s), is that last bit still accurate for Rails 8?

I spotted that one as well. Now that Rails 8 offers native Authentication functionality I assume that would need to be updated.

In addition to that I also thought propshaft deserved some attention as an addition to Rails 8.

Thanks for point this out. I believe Sam will be addressing that in his next update.

Good catch on authentication! I’ve removed the bullet.

As to propshaft, prior editions didn’t really cover sprockets, and I’ve yet to discover a user visible difference between the two pipelines; can you provide a little more detail as to what you are looking for?

I’m just a noob so if you don’t think it needs addressing it clearly doesn’t.

I was just referencing a list of the major changes in rails 8. Apologies for any confusion, I’ll try to be more mindful with any suggestions in the future. :slightly_smiling_face:

Please do continue to make suggestions! Propshaft is an internal detail that the Rails team is proud of, but it it is essentially invisible to Rails developers. If you look closely at the HTML that is generated by a typical Rails app, you will see things like

<link rel="modulepreload" href="/assets/application-bfcdf840.js">

Propshaft is the component that creates that hex number before the dot. Before Propshaft, this was done by Sprockets, which had the ability to invoke preprocessors like coffee-script that no longer are popular, So the big changes is that you can no longer do something you weren’t likely to want to do anyway; and the Rails code base got smaller/simpler.

1 Like

Thank you so much for taking the time to explain that! I will continue to share any suggestions I come across :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like