GodObject

I just updated our Video Streaming App to Rails 5 and am very pleased with it.
The upgrade path had just a minor bump with some failing test cases due to an incompatibility with devise 4.1.1 and therefore switched to 4.2.0 which was released 4 hours ago.

Action Cable now finally works like a charm, no need to manage the AR Connections manually anymore and also the bug with deadlocks when using multiple channels is gone.

Thinking back to the early days of Action Cable, it has come a long way and gives you an easy option to harness the power of websockets from within your Rails App.

Some years ago I was quite intrigued by the websocket support of Torquebox 3 and on paper it all seemed awesome. You get a nice abstraction layer using the STOMP protocol with Stilts and perfect integration with a Bridge for JMS with your backend messaging system HornetQ all out of the box on a JBoss AS. You would have everything nicely bundled in your rails monolith and just deloy it in Torquebox and you are done, compared to the alternatives at the time where you would deploy your rails app to Phusion Passenger and have to setup something seperate for websockets. In practice it was kind of a letdown, for example one issue I encountered was that it wasn’t really reliable, websockets would just close down and stuff like that.

Now with Action Cable it just works™. In the mentioned application we have a chat, updates of the current viewer count of a stream, the list of logged in users that watch it, and status changes all funneled through Action Cable backed by Redis with no hickups whatsoever.