Lock up all the unicorns. You can’t please everyone all the time, so don’t focus on the unicorns.
No holy cows. Nothing is sacred in rails & everything is up for debate. Don’t look any anything we have & feel like that is the way it has to be.
Major Themes:
New routes. Faster, route by subdomain, user agents, etc. Rack to other rack machinery.
XSS protection (cross side injection). By default all output in views will be escaped. No more use of <%= h something %>. Assumed by default.
Javascript goes Unobtrusive & Agnostic. Much less JS is injected into page & instead unobtrusive JS is used to achieve same effect.
More Agnosticism.
Action ORM is a slim proxy wrapper for ORM tools that allows for easy swapping of ORM implementation,
Generators (script/generator) will for example allow you to specify that rspec is used, so script/generate model will create a rspec test file for model.
Refactoring
Abstract Controller takes similarities between for example ActionController & ActionMailer and combines them into one code base.
Cherry picking from ActiveSupport allowing you to pick parts that are used instead of pulling in the entire library.